Fiction - Results from #2470

Resistance Women
Jennifer Chiaverini, 2020
William Morrow
608 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062841100

Summary
An enthralling historical saga that recreates the danger, romance, and sacrifice of an era and brings to life one courageous, passionate American—Mildred Fish Harnack—and her circle of women friends who waged a clandestine battle against Hitler in Nazi Berlin.

After Wisconsin graduate student Mildred Fish marries brilliant German economist Arvid Harnack, she accompanies him to his German homeland, where a promising future awaits.

In the thriving intellectual culture of 1930s Berlin, the newlyweds create a rich new life filled with love, friendships, and rewarding work—but the rise of a malevolent new political faction inexorably changes their fate.

As Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party wield violence and lies to seize power, Mildred, Arvid, and their friends resolve to resist.

Mildred gathers intelligence for her American contacts, including Martha Dodd, the vivacious and very modern daughter of the US ambassador. Her German friends, aspiring author Greta Kuckoff and literature student Sara Weitz, risk their lives to collect information from journalists, military officers, and officials within the highest levels of the Nazi regime.

For years, Mildred’s network stealthily fights to bring down the Third Reich from within. But when Nazi radio operatives detect an errant Russian signal, the Harnack resistance cell is exposed, with fatal consequences.

Inspired by actual events, Resistance Women is an enthralling, unforgettable story of ordinary people determined to resist the rise of evil, sacrificing their own lives and liberty to fight injustice and defend the oppressed. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Raised—Ohio, Michigan, and Southern California (USA)
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame; University of Chicago
• Currently—lives in Madison, Wisconsin

Jennifer Chiaverini is an American quilter and author. She is best known for writing the Elm Creek Quilts novels. In 2013, in a departure from her quilting novels, she published Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker.

Growing up one of three children, Chiaverini lived in Ohio, Michigan and Southern California. She loved to read all genres, but ultimately fell in love with historical fiction. "My parents indulged my storytelling. I’ve wanted to write since I was young." The desire to quilt came later.

A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, she is also a former writing instructor at Penn State and Edgewood College. She lives with her husband and two sons in Madison, Wisconsin.

In addition to the seventeen volumes of the Elm Creek Quilts series, she is the author of four volumes of quilt patterns inspired by her novels, as well as the designer of the Elm Creek Quilts fabric lines from Red Rooster Fabrics. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[A]n intimate… exploration of the years leading up to and through WWII… told with prose that ranges from forthright to eloquent…. [T]he focus on the road to war and evolving attitudes regarding fascism and Nazism is exceptionally insightful, making for a sweeping and memorable WWII novel.
Publishers Weekly

Readers who value historical accuracy will definitely find it here. Skilled storyteller Chiaverini once again offers a compelling read based on real-life events and people. Even those not usually drawn to historical fiction will find this hard to put down. —Pamela O'Sullivan, Coll. at Brockport Lib., SUNY
Library Journal

Chiaverini never loses her focus on her four extraordinarily courageous, resourceful, yet relatable narrators. Chiaverini’s many fans and every historical fiction reader who enjoys strong female characters, will find much to love in this revealing WWII novel.
Booklist

[F]our women boldly defy the Nazis, risking their own lives and those of their loved ones.… Chiaverini's latest historical novel masterfully reimagines [their] real lives…. A riveting, complex tale of the courage of ordinary people.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Had you heard of Mildred Fish Harnack or the Red Orchestra before reading Resistance Women? What role do novels have in our understanding of history? Did Resistance Women change your perception of World War II or Nazi Germany?

2. From Mildred’s and Greta’s humble beginnings to Sara’s and Martha’s more privileged upbringings, Resistance Women tells the story of women from very different backgrounds. Discuss how their unique personalities contributed to the resistance fight. Which woman’s story resonated with you the most?

3. In response to Mildred saying that she is no longer surprised by the fighting between the Communist Reds and the Nazi Browns, Arvid responds, "Darling, you must never become accustomed to the extraordinary and outrageous. If you do, little by little, you’ll learn to accept anything." Do you agree? In what ways does Mildred take his advice to heart? What examples of this accepting of the outrageous have you seen in your own life?

4. Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church)—the traditional vision of women aspurely domestic—is mentioned more than once by Mildred and her comrades. The slogan dates from the eighteenth century but reappeared in Hitler’s Germany. Why do you think the Nazis chose to glorify homemaking and childrearing in their vision of the Reich? How did that idealized vision of housewives contrast with what women were actually doing in Germany during the war years?

5. When forced to decide whether to help translate Hitler’s manifesto into English, Greta ultimately decides to work on the translation. Was that the right decision? What was her motivation for doing the work?

6. Despite having a young child, Greta and Adam still chose to take part in the Red Orchestra. Would you have done the same?

7. What did you make of Sarah’s relationship with Dieter? What do you think her life would have been like had she chosen to stay with him and get married?

8. Mildred goes home to the US at one point, but chooses to return to Germany, to Arvid and the work of resistance. Was that a foolish decision? A brave one? What would you have done?

9. "Perhaps Germany will serve as a warning," Arvid says. "May they learn from us tosnuff out fascism in America when the first sparks arise and not delay until democracy goes up in flames all around them." Has America learned that lesson? What factors might cause fascism to rise in America as it did in Nazi Germany? How would Americans combat it?
(Questions by the publishers.)

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Resolve
J.J. Hensley, 2013
The Permanent Press
250 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781579624828

Summary
In the Pittsburgh Marathon, 18,000 people from all over the world will participate. Over 9,500 will run the half marathon, 4,000 will run in relays while others plan to run brief stretches. 4,500 people will attempt to cover the full 26.2 miles.

Over 200 of the participants will quit, realizing it just wasn't their day. More than 100 will get injured and require medical treatment—and one man is going to be murdered.

When Dr. Cyprus Keller lines up to start the race, he knows who is going to die for one simple reason. He's going to kill them.

As a professor of Criminology at Three Rivers University, and a former police officer, Dr. Cyprus Keller is an expert in criminal behavior and victimology. However, when one of his female students is murdered and his graduate assistant attempts to kill him, Keller finds himself frantically swinging back and forth between being a suspect and a victim.

When the police assign a motive to the crimes that Keller knows cannot be true, he begins to ask questions that somebody out there does not want answered. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974-75
• Where—Huntington, West Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Pennsylvania State University; M.S., Columbia Southern University
• Awards—Suspense Magazine Best Debut; Authors on the Air, Top 10 of the Year
• Currently—lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

J.J. Hensley spent three years as a police officer in Virginia before becoming a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He draws upon those experiences to write novels full of suspense and insight.

Hensley, who is originally from Huntington, WV, graduated from Penn State University with a B.S. in Administration of Justice and has a M.S. in Criminal Justice Administration from Columbia Southern University. The author lives with his family near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hensley’s novel Resolve was named one of the Best Books of 2013 by Suspense Magazine and as a finalist for Best First Novel by the International Thriller Writers organization. His second book, Measure Twice, was released in 2014, and his third, Chalk's Outline, came out in 2016.

In addition to his three novels, Hensley writes short stories—"Vehemence" was published in 2014, and "Four Days Forever" appeared in the 2015 anthology, Legacy.

Hensley is a member of the International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow J.J. Hensley on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Hensley has drawn upon his law enforcement experience and his love of long-distance running to create a fast-paced novel about murder at the Pittsburgh Marathon. The descriptions of running rituals and what happens once sneakers are laced feels real enough to get the heart of even the most committed couch potatoes racing.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

This artfully constructed mystery makes effective use of the third-rate-college setting and of Pittsburgh, as revealed by the course of the marathon, marked by each of the 26 chapters plus a brief final one headed “.2.”
Publishers Weekly

J.J. Hensley's debut novel is a lean, fast-paced, suspenseful murder mystery—told with style, intelligence, and wit. It pulled me in immediately and kept me guessing from start to finish.
John Verdon - bestselling author of Let The Devil Sleep

Resolve marks the emergence of J.J. Hensley as a crime writer to watch, an author whose real world scars give him an insight into fiction's mean streets.
James Grady - author of Six Days of the Condor and Mad Dogs

Five Stars...this is a near-perfect debut that gripped me from the crowds milling at the starting line, to the exhausting sprint across the finish line.
Rachel Cotterill Book Reviews

It takes serious resolve to run a marathon, to solve a crime, or to kill someone, and this Pittsburgh race provides a perfect framework for the murder to come. But what makes a former police officer turned criminology professor turn so far from the rule of law? The route twists and turns through wide streets of clean modernity down into poverty and shame, while the plot twists through Keller’s memories, giving both race and mystery a taut immediacy. Perfectly paced like the runner’s tread, cleverly revealed, tautly plotted and convincingly woven, Resolve brings vivid excitement and complex drama to marathon running, murder and investigation. Authentic, compelling, gripping and impossible to put down, this pleasingly different mystery novel is highly recommended.
Sheila Deeth, Gather.com

Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
Are they plausible or implausible?
Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

Is the conclusion probable or believable?
Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
Perhaps it's too predictable.
Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Rest Now, Beloved
Blake S. Lee, 2015
CreateSpace
334 pp.
ISBN-13: 1508754039

Summary
In Rest Now, Beloved, a fictional account of an actual police case, seven-year-old Christopher Abkhazian refuses to be forgotten.

This child's death took place during the waning days of Prohibition in San Diego. Some said it was accidental death; pathologists disagreed.

Unsolved, it gathered dust on cold case shelves for over sixty years. When a team of forensic detectives reopens the investigation in 1990, it expects to put the case to closure. But this victim demands closure, not obscurity.

An unlikely duo begins an investigation of their own. Ex-policeman Pete McGraw believes this case has been purposely mishandled; there is a cover-up. McGraw knows the facts; he was the chief detective in 1933.

Reporter Sera Schilling begins delving. As the truth unfolds, she steps on a land mine when she uncovers a dark and deadly family secret—a secret they would kill to keep buried.

Author Bio
• Birth—April 5, 1944
• Where—Rochester, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., San Diego State University
• Currently—San Diego, California

Writing under the pseudonym of Blake S. Lee, the author is a long-time resident of San Diego. She is married, the mother of three grown daughters, and the grandmother of four grandchildren who delightfully fill her time. Having taught high school literature, she has a profound respect for the written word and admiration of other brilliant minds who have expressed it. This is her debut novel.

Ms. Lee has been asked how the idea for this novel came to her. In 1990, as a graduate student in an archival records research class, she was assigned a name of a victim. She had no further information, other than the victim's death became a cold case. It was her responsibility to "solve" the case using documents, interviews, records, etc.

The path that the protagonist, Sera Schilling, a newspaper reporter, takes in seeking the truth behind a child's brutal death so long ago mirrors Lee's paper trail, the mode of investigation in 1990, pre-computer age. The obsession for closure that propels protagonist, Pete McGraw in his obsession for closure, is felt in Lee's compelling sensitivity to the lives and times of those involved in the boy's death.

The catalyst that fired inspiration to write a fictional account of this story was when this case was reopened by a forensic team of detectives in 2005. Using no new information, witnesses, or evidence, the team closed the case and purged the records. Feeling that this re-investigation appeared shamefully scanty, Lee wrote this parallel story in order to give the victim voice. (From the author.)

Book Reviews
A fast-paced and haunting mystery novel (that) almost seamlessly weaves together the new and old, bringing sentimentality, family, love, and violent injustice together in a way that feels both touching and painfully true.
CreateSpace

An intrepid junior reporter takes on a decades-old cold case.... Lee's engrossing prose is rooted in specific detail that wonderfully evokes the setting of San Diego, both contemporary and historical. A complex, well-plotted tale with an engaging setting.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Although the book, Rest Now, Beloved is specific to a place and time, what human issues are presented to readers that are universal and common?

2. How does the relationship between Pete McGraw and Sera Schilling evolve in the book?

3. Pete McGraw's police journal is the key to solving the mystery. Why does Lee wait until near the end of the story to present it?

4. If you were to choose a single adjective to describe your feelings at the end of the book, Rest Now, Beloved, what word would you choose and why?

5. What drives Sera Schilling?

6. What drives Pete McGraw?

7. What are your impressions of the fictional character, Paco? Was his character developed enough to create suspense? Why did author Lee keep his character in the background?

8. In what ways does Rest Now, Beloved differ from typical mysteries or cold case novels?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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The Rest of Her Life
Laura Moriarity, 2007
Hyperion
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781401309435

Summary
In The Rest of Her Life, Laura Moriarty delivers a luminous, compassionate, and provocative look at how mothers and daughters with the best intentions can be blind to the harm they do to one another.

Leigh is the mother of high-achieving, popular high school senior Kara. Their relationship is already strained for reasons Leigh does not fully understand when, in a moment of carelessness, Kara makes a mistake that ends in tragedy—the effects of which not only divide Leigh's family, but polarize the entire community. We see the story from Leigh's perspective, as she grapples with the hard reality of what her daughter has done and the devastating consequences her actions have on the family of another teenage girl in town, all while struggling to protect Kara in the face of rising public outcry.

Like the best works of Jane Hamilton, Jodi Picoult, and Alice Sebold, Laura Moriarty's The Rest of Her Life is a novel of complex moral dilemma, filled with nuanced characters and a page-turning plot that makes readers ask themselves, "What would I do?" (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 24, 1970
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.S.W. and M.A., University of Kansas
• Currently—Lives in Lawrence, Kansas

Laura Moriarty received her master’s degree from the University of Kansas, and was awarded the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. The Center of Everything is Moriarty's first novel. Her second, The Rest of her Life, was published in 2007, While I'm Falling in 2009, and The Chaperone in 2012. (From the publisher.)

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• There are other Laura Moriartys I shouldn't be confused with: Laura Moriarty the poet, and Laura Moriarty the crime writer. If it helps, I'm Laura Eugenia Moriarty, though I've never used my middle name professionally.

• I got my first job when I was sixteen, cooking burgers at McDonald's. I've been a vegetarian since I was ten, so it was a little hard on me. I'm also technically inept and kind of dreamy, so I frustrated the guy who worked the toaster to the point where he threatened to strangle me on a daily basis. I kept that job for two years. I gave Evelyn a job at McDonald's too, and I made her similarly unsuccessful.

• Another job I was really bad at was tending bar. I was an exchange student at the University of Malta about ten years ago. I thought I wanted to go to medical school, so I signed up to take all these organic chemistry and physiology classes. In Malta. It was terrible. The Maltese students were into chemistry. I had a lab partner named Ester Carbone. There was a rumor my instructor had his house built in the shape of a benzene molecule. I couldn't keep up. I dropped out in February, and I needed money. Malta has pretty strict employment laws, and the only job I could get was an illegal one, working at a bar. I don't know anything about mixed drinks, and I don't speak Maltese. I think I was supposed to stand behind the bar be American and female and smile, but I ended up squinting at people a lot, so eventually, I was in the back, doing dishes. That was the year I started writing.

• The Center of Everything has a few autobiographical moments, but not many. I grew up with three sisters in Montana. When you say you're from Montana, people get this wistful look in their eyes. I think they've seen too many Brad Pitt movies. I saw A River Runs Through It, which is set in my hometown, Bozeman. That movie drove me nuts: I don't think anyone is even wearing coat in the whole movie. They can't keep filming up there in August and tricking everyone. Of course, now I live in Maine.

• I have tender hands, and the worst thing in the world, for me, is going to an event that requires a lot of hand shaking. Some people shake nicely, but some people have a death grip, and it's really painful. The thing is, you can't tell who's going to be a death gripper and who isn't. Big, strapping men have shaken my hand gently, but an elderly woman I met last month almost brought me to my knees. She was smiling the whole time. I went to a hand shaking event a month ago, and I went along with the shaking, because I didn't want to look rude or standoffish or freaky about germs. But hand shaking just kills me. I'm not sure what to do about it. I went back to Phillips Exeter a month ago, and a very polite student reintroduced himself to me and extended his hand to shake. I actually tried to high five him. He looked at me like I was a crazy person. My sister told me I should take a cue from Bob Dole and carry a pen in my right hand all the time, so I might try that.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:

It's difficult to pick just one, of course. But I will say that while I was writing The Center of Everything, I read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World, and it made a strong impression on me. I only knew about Sagan from watching the Nova Channel when I was a kid, but I happened upon an essay he'd written before he died. I was so impressed I went to the library and checked out some of his books. In The Demon Haunted World, Sagan stresses the importance of skepticism and rational reasoning when considering the mysteries of the universe.

It's easy for us today to see the insanity of the witchcraft trials, but Sagan gives a sympathetic account of how frightening the world must have seemed in those times, and how quickly our ability to reason can be dismissed in the face of fear and superstition. Today, Sagan points out, we have crop circles, alien abductions, and religious fundamentalism; the book has a great chapter called "The Baloney Detection Kit," an important tool for any open-minded skeptic. What I like most about Sagan is that he seems skeptical without coming across as cynical. He looks at the vastness of the universe and the intricacy of the natural world with so much wonder and awe, and he's able to translate it to a reader who isn't a scientist, such as myself. I also noticed how he refrains from making fun or putting down his opponents; there's such a generosity of spirit in his writing. I tried to put a bit of Sagan in Evelyn, the narrator of The Center of Everything. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Like Kate DiCamillo's Because of Winn-Dixie and Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, Laura Moriarty's first novel, The Center of Everything, owed its success to the immense likability of a young female protagonist. Mixing just the right combination of solemnity and cheer, Moriarty turned a potentially sappy coming-of-age tale into a full-on charmer with the voice of her 10-year-old narrator, Evelyn Bucknow of Kerrville, Kan., who courageously traversed a hard-luck childhood without any false moves. In her second novel, the author has achieved an even more impressive goal, inspiring compassion for a character unblessed with Evelyn's immediate appeal.... Moriarty's novel shows that it is not literature's job to be uplifting, or even to be beautiful. It is literature's job to say yes, to every corner of every life: yes to disaffected characters like Leigh as well as to winsome ones like Evelyn Bucknow; yes to grief as much as to solace; yes to wrongdoers as well as to the wronged; and yes most of all to "our weak attempts," as Leigh acknowledges, "to feel each other's burdens."
Donna Rifkind - Washington Post

Moriarty's follow-up to book-group favorite The Center of Everything again explores a tense, fragile mother-daughter relationship, this time finding sharper edges where personal history and parenting meet. Now a junior high school English teacher married to a college professor, Leigh has spent much of her adult life trying to distance herself from her dysfunctional childhood. Raising their two children in a small, safe Kansas town not far from where Leigh and her troubled sister, Pam, were raised by their single mother, Leigh finds her good fortune still somewhat empty. Daughter Kara, 18 and a high school senior, is distant; sensitive younger son Justin is unpopular; Leigh can't seem to reach either-Kara in particular sees Leigh (rightly) as self-absorbed. When Kara accidentally hits and kills another high school girl with the family's car, Leigh is forced to confront her troubled relationship with her daughter, her resentment toward her husband (who understands Kara better) and her long-buried angst about her own neglectful mother. The intriguing supporting characters are limited by not-very-likable Leigh's point of view, but Moriarty effectively conveys Leigh's longing for escape and wariness of reckoning.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) It's the dream of every woman who had a troubled relationship with her mother that her relationship with her own daughter will be different, and Leigh's mother, who left Leigh to fend for herself when she was 16 years old, was certainly no role model. Unfortunately, though raised with love, care, and the financial security of an upper-middle class lifestyle, 18-year-old Kara has never been close to her mom. So when Kara, driving inattentively, accidentally kills another high school girl, past and present begin to merge in Leigh's distraught mind. While the first half of the novel is excellent, the second half is studded with what seem like unavoidable cliches. Moriarty (The Center of Everything) can't seem to get out of her own way; it's almost as if she's repeating information straight out of self-help books. Then there's the larger problem of transferring a novel this slowly paced to audio. Julia Gibson's narration is spirited, but Moriarty's sense of language is not well crafted enough to be fully absorbing. Recommended for larger collections.
Rochelle Ratner - Library Journal

Another novel of troubled mothers and daughters from Moriarty (The Center of Everything, 2003), whose straightforward, unadorned prose speaks on some level to every woman. Leigh and her older sister Pam came up the hard way, always the new kids at school in one nameless town after another because their divorced mother kept changing jobs. Left to fend for herself when Mom moved alone to California, Leigh struggled to make it through college. In addition to a degree in education, she also picked up Shakespearean grad student Gary. As the book opens, the couple lives in a small Kansas town; Gary teaches at the local university, Leigh at the middle school. Their daughter Kara, just about to graduate from high school and leave for college, is a golden girl who doesn't find it easy to relate to her mother. Younger child Justin, engaging but friendless, longs for acceptance from his peers. The middle-class family's seemingly golden life hits a bump in the road when Kara, driving home from school, accidentally strikes a fellow student in a pedestrian crossing and kills her. The small town that had seemed like a protective blanket suddenly becomes a city of eyes, watching and prying — or at least that's how the family perceives it. As Kara struggles with her conscience, Leigh finds herself unable to connect with her own daughter. She remembers her hardscrabble childhood and the mother she swore never to emulate. In this compelling story of female relationships — mothers, sisters, daughters and best friends — Moriarty's characters grab readers the minute they enter the story, and recollections of their vivid personalities will linger long after the last page. Well-written, convincing and impossible to put down.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Leigh is certainly a flawed human being. But what are her strengths — as a mother and as a human being? What are her weaknesses? If her weaknesses are a product of her difficult childhood, why is her sister so different?

2. In the course of the novel, the relationship between Leigh and Kara changes. What do you think of as the major turning point in their relationship? What do you think was at the heart of the conflict?

3. How important is the setting to this story? Would the same situation have played out differently in a larger town, a suburb, or a city? What do you think would have been the same?

4. At the beginning of the novel, Leigh believes she likes living in a small town like Danby because she likes the sense of community it offers. Is she really a part of this community? How does Leigh’s relationship to the town change over the summer?

5. When Leigh accuses Eva of being a gossip, Eva defends herself by saying she just cares about what’s happening in the lives of people in her community. Do you buy this? Leigh spends a lot of time worrying about what people are saying about her family, but is gossip ever a positive force in the story? Do you like Eva? Why or why not?

6. After hearing Eva deny being a gossip, Leigh is stunned: “People didn’t see themselves, she considered. It was almost eerie when you saw it face to face.” Who else in the novel might not see herself or himself clearly? Does anyone? Do you think of this selective “vision” as a conscious choice or a true inability?

7. Is Gary a better parent than Leigh? In what ways does his relationship with Justin mirror Leigh’s relationship with Kara? What is it about each child that brings out such different responses from both Gary and Leigh?

8. The first time the bereaved mother confronts Kara, it is Leigh — not Gary — who steps in to protect her. Leigh believes she recognizes something in Diane Kletchka, something we can assume Gary does not. What do you think it is about Diane that feels familiar to Leigh?

9. In this novel, we see Leigh in several different kinds of relationships: she's a mother, a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a friend. How do all these different roles compete with each other for Leigh's attention/ loyalty? Does she give too much attention to any one role? Not enough to another? In what ways do these different kinds of relationships influence one another?
(Questions from the publisher.)

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The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Cherise Wolas, 2017
Flatiron Books
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 978125008143#

Summary
I viewed the consumptive nature of love as a threat to serious women. But the wonderful man I just married believes as I do—work is paramount, absolutely no children—and now love seems to me quite marvelous.

These words are spoken to a rapturous audience by Joan Ashby, a brilliant and intense literary sensation acclaimed for her explosively dark and singular stories.

When Joan finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, she is stunned by Martin’s delight, his instant betrayal of their pact. She makes a fateful, selfless decision then, to embrace her unintentional family.

Challenged by raising two precocious sons, it is decades before she finally completes her masterpiece novel. Poised to reclaim the spotlight, to resume the intended life she gave up for love, a betrayal of Shakespearean proportion forces her to question every choice she has made.

Epic, propulsive, incredibly ambitious, and dazzlingly written, The Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a story about sacrifice and motherhood, the burdens of expectation and genius. Cherise Wolas’s gorgeous debut introduces an indelible heroine candid about her struggles and unapologetic in her ambition. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.F.A., New York University; J.D., Loyola University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Cherise Wolas is a writer, lawyer, and film producer. She received a BFA from New York University’s Tisch was School of the Arts, and a JD from Loyola Law School. The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, her debut novel, was published in 2017, and The Family Tabor in 2018.

A native of Los Angeles, she lives in New York City with her husband. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Love and betrayal and expectation, all encapsulated in the story of one woman, Joan Ashby, and the surprises and disappointments of her life. Wolas' debut turns a critical and perceptive eye onto the complications and expectations of marriage. It’s also gorgeously written. Get into it.
Southern Living

You will not come away unchanged, and you will continue to think about Joan Ashby’s path long after you put this brick down.… [A] masterful (mistress-ful? We need a better modifier …) debut novel that dares to consider whether becoming a mother is worth it, or not.
LitHub

[L]ong-winded.… The novel, in addition to overextending itself…is frustrating, shallowly addressing its central theme of artistic pursuit versus family, and eventually turns into more of an inspirational primer on Buddhism than character study.
Publishers Weekly

[A]stonishing debut…innovative…brilliant.
Shelf Awareness

(Starred review.) [L]ayer upon layer of precisely meshed poetic and cinematic scenes to realize a life of such quiet majesty…. Readers not only will mourn coming to the end, they will feel compelled to start over to watch the miracle of this novel unfold again. Breathtaking.
Library Journal

It’s almost impossible to believe that The Resurrection of Joan Ashby…is the first novel by Cherise Wolas, a lawyer and film producer. Gorgeously written and completely captivating, the book spans decades and continents, deftly capturing the tug so many women feel between motherhood and self-identity.
BookPage

(Starred review.) This breathtaking…novel will do for motherhood what Gone Girl (2012) did for marriage. "A story requires two things: a great story to tell and the bravery to tell it," Joan observes. Wolas’ debut expertly checks off both boxes.
Booklist

(Starred review.) Like John Irving’s The World According to Garp, this is a look at the life of a writer that will entertain many nonwriters. Like Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, it’s a sharp-eyed portrait of the artist as spouse…. [O]ne wonders how Wolas is possibly going to pay off the idea that her heroine is such a genius. Verdict: few could do better.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel’s title. How is Joan "resurrected" over the course of the novel?

2. Do you agree that "treacheries experienced in childhood are among the most difficult to overcome, or to forgive"? How is Joan shaped by her childhood, and how are her husband and children? Discuss the ways in which treachery affects their family dynamic. What do you believe is the role of nature vs. nurture in terms of ambition success?

3. Daniel reflects:

It is a long-borne burden, knowing what you lack, and I knew what I lacked.… Where, I thought, was the lost and found for discarded genius, from which I could select what I desperately wanted and needed ?" How does this novel define "genius"?

What is the relationship between genius and work in these characters’ lives?

4. Joan says in an interview:

Love was more than simply inconvenient; its consumptive nature always a threat to serious women. I had seen too often what happened to serious women in love, their sudden, unnatural lightheartedness, their new wardrobe of happiness their prior selves would never have worn, the loss of their forward momentum. I wanted no such conversion, no vulnerability to needless distraction.

Do you agree? How do Joan’s views on love shift over the course of the novel?

5. What role do the excerpts of Joan’s stories and novels play in The Resurrection of Joan Ashby? Did you read them as a lens into her character, ambitions, and perspective on motherhood? Do you have a favorite excerpt?

6. Joan asks:

Is motherhood inescapably entwined in female life, a story every woman ends up telling, whether or not she sought or desired that bond; her nourishment, her caretaking, her love, needed by someone standing before her, hands held out, heart demanding succor, commanding her not to look away, but to dig deep, give of herself unstintingly, offer up everything she can?

What would you answer? Discuss the various depictions of motherhood in the novel, including in Joan’s own writing.

7. Joan reflects at one point: "Writers have infinite choices and mothers nearly no choice at all." How do her roles as writer and mother shape her over the course of the novel? Does she ultimately reconcile those two sides of herself?

8. Joan refers to her characters as "her people." Discuss Joan’s different creations, as an author and as a mother. How much control does she have over her characters? Over her children?

9. How do you feel about Joan’s letter to Daniel? Do you think he deserves a second chance? What does the novel suggest about unconditional love within families? Do you think we hold mothers to different standards than fathers when it comes to unconditional love?

10. Vita Brodkey says to Joan: "I will not tell you to be safe, safety is for fools, but remember everything." What is the importance of memory and history in this novel? Discuss Vita’s importance in Joan’s life.

11. Joan finds herself living an"unintended life." What is the relationship between intention and accident in the novel? How much agency do we have in our own stories? How does meditation shape Joan’s quest to live an intended life?

12. Names play a significant role throughout this novel. Discuss Joan’s decision to go by "Ashby" when she is in India. How does she change over the course of the novel, and what role do names play in that transformation?

13. What is the role of place in the narrative? How do Joan’s various homes influence her happiness and creativity? Where does she most belong, and how does she find belonging? How is India, in particular, portrayed, and how does the country itself shape Joan’s transformation?

14. Joan, Martin, Daniel, and Eric all keep secrets from one another. How do those secrets protect or harm them? Are secrets inevitable within families? Do artistic endeavor and genius have their own rules when it comes to openness?

15. When Joan has been in Dharamshala for several months, she finally takes a pilgrimage. Willem meets her on the way, and tells her a pilgrimage doesn’t have to be taken alone. Discuss Joan and Willem’s relationship, and how it differs from Joan’s relationship with Martin.

16. Kartar tells Daniel his name means "Lord of Creation." What does Kartar’s presence in both Daniel’s and Joan’s life mean? How would you characterize his role? Has he shaped his life around the meaning of his name and the stories his own mother told him?

17. If you could leave your life to pursue your dream, where would you go, what would you do?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Retribution
Jilliane Hoffman, 2004
Penguin Group USA
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616875213

Summary
When an elite prosecutor faces the most lethal predator she's ever encountered, it all comes down to a choice between justice...and retribution.

One rainy night in New York City, outstanding law student Chloe Larson wakes from a terrible nightmare. But it's not a nightmare-it's real. A stranger stands over her, a rubber clown mask covering his face, and in one, horrifying instant, everything in Chloe’s life is forever changed. She becomes a victim, a statistic. And no one is brought to justice.

Twelve years later a very different Chloe is forging a formidable reputation as a Major Crimes prosecutor in the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office. For more than a year she has been assigned to assist a task force of detectives who have been searching for a vicious serial killer nicknamed Cupid for the way he kills his victims. Nine women are dead and two are missing and the pressure is mounting to find the vicious killer. When the police stop a speeding motorist on the McArthur Causeway, it seems that the hunt for Cupid is finally over. But as Chloe begins the task of prosecuting the suspect, she soon realizes that this case will be anything but easy. Because her past is about to force itself on her present-and the terror is only just beginning.

Sometimes there is a price to be paid for justice. And sometimes that price is awful. Revenge could cost Chloe her sanity. The truth could cost her life. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Long Island, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., J.D., St. John's University
• Currently—lives in South Florida

Jilliane Hoffman is an American writer of legal thrillers. Before starting to write Hoffman experienced the true life of a lawyer while working as an assistant state's attorney prosecuting felonies in Florida from 1992 to 1996. From 1996 to 2001, she was a regional advisor for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement consulting with more than 100 special agents in complicated investigations including homicide, narcotics and organized crime.

With the knowledge obtained through years of work as a lawyer, Hoffman turned to writing legal/crime thrillers. Her first novel, Retribution, was published in 2004, followed by Last Witness in 2005 and Plea of Insanity in 2007. She lives in South Florida with her husband and two children. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Highly satisfying.... Retribution explores chillingly dark places.
San Francisco Chronicle

A tense legal tale...Retribution delivers.... A little bit James Patterson, a little bit John Grisham.
New York Daily News

A Nasty, exciting scenario.
Chicago Tribune

This is a fine first novel, with twists and turns of the highest order and an ending that is downright breathtaking
Booklist

With this graphic serial killer/courtroom thriller, debut novelist Hoffman joins the lengthening list of high-powered legal ladies whose professional expertise serves as the basis for authentic, insider crime fiction. Blond, beautiful law student Chloe Larson is looking forward to a great future with successful New York businessman Michael Decker. Her expectations are shattered forever after a madman in a clown mask rapes and tortures her until she is near death. She survives physically, but psychologically slips into an extended mental breakdown. Twelve years later she's dyed her hair mousy brown and become unassuming, hardworking C.J. Townsend, assistant chief of the Miami Dade State Attorney's office. A suspiciously lucky break nets serial killer suspect William Bantling, and C.J. takes over the prosecution as part of her normal workload. When Bantling stands up in court and speaks, C.J. realizes he's the man who raped her years ago. C.J. learns that the statute of limitations has run out on her rape and that her involvement in that case might very well cause Bantling to be freed on a technicality. Love interest Special Agent Dominick Falconetti knows there is something seriously wrong as C.J.'s mental state begins to deteriorate, but she brushes off his concern and immerses herself in her work on the case. The far-fetched resolution will throw some readers, but Hoffman compensates with a compellingly horrific villain and an undeniably exciting final confrontation.... Hoffman fits right in [with courtroom thriller genre] and ups the ante with an original premise and more-graphic-than-usual violence.
Publishers Weekly

(Audio version.) In the late 1980s, law student Chloe Larson was brutally raped and left for dead in her New York apartment. Fast-forward 12 years; Chloe, now known as C.J. Townsend, is one of the top prosecutors in Miami. It is in this capacity that she finds herself face to face with the man who terrorized her. She recognizes the voice of William Bantling, who is now on trial for a string of gruesome murders. C.J. confronts an impossible dilemma: perform her ethical duty and recuse herself from the case, or exact retribution on the man who almost killed her. With this predicament firmly in hand, Hoffman takes the listener on a remarkable ride, one that is fast paced, thrilling, and features extremely interesting characters. The courtroom scenes and legal explanations are especially enjoyable. Martha Plimpton's characterizations for the abridged versions are strong and distinct. Kathe Mazur's performance is natural, more subtle, and not as pronounced or staged as Plimpton's. Either audio edition of Retribution is recommended for public libraries. —Nicole A. Cooke, Montclair State Univ. Lib., NJ
Library Journal

Pedestrian debut thriller about a rape victim who tries her assailant in court. Chloe Larson is a law student on Long Island in 1988, and outside her apartment, a man watches her every move, including her hot trysts with a boyfriend. One stormy night, the watcher breaks into her apartment, rapes her, then brutally carves her up with a serrated blade. She barely survives. So far, so familiar-and so flat, with Hoffman laying on the clichés and brand names as description. Then comes the first of many twists. It's September 2000 and Miami state attorney C.J. Townsend faces defendant William Bantling, who may be "Cupid," a serial killer who rapes his victims, then cuts out their hearts. C.J. spots a scar on Bantling's arm and crumbles: he's the man who raped her when she was Chloe Larson, before she altered her identity and fled Long Island. C.J. decides to nail this vermin and bends the law by hiding this part of her past, even from law enforcement agent Dominick Falconetti, with whom she becomes romantically involved. Hoffman adds a modicum of suspense by throwing several roadblocks in the way of C.J.'s quest for retribution. The FBI wants to usurp the case. The defense attorney has evidence that could derail it. And Bantling slowly realizes C.J. is Chloe. (The tired and offensive notion that Bantling may be a frustrated, woman-hating homosexual comes up, but is wisely scrapped — as the pointless and gratuitous homophobic thoughts of one of the investigators should have been.) C.J. lands her case, but learns she may have convicted the wrong man. In a burst of last-act plotting, Hoffman lets matters unravel, then provides a satisfying tie-up. Although criminal attorney Hoffman devises an interesting premise and springs some surprises, her flat prose fails to lift her work above the ordinary.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Retribution:

1. Hoffman's writing is particuarly graphic. Do you think she used her depictions judiciously—in the service of the story? Or do you think the brutality is gratis—there only to sensational-ize her book?

2. As both victim and prosecutor, C.J. is faced with a terrible conundrum and must decide, ultimately, what is right or wrong. Do you think she handles the problem correctly or not?

3. In her work, Hoffman has counseled rape victims. Do you feel that she portrayed C.J.'s emtional and psychological wounds realistically?

4. The case's big stumbling block is a technicality: a rooky policemen's improper search, conducted without probably cause. Do you think the issue is resolved fairly? ... which leads to the next question:

5. Do you feel the justice system favors the accused at the expense of the victim or survivors? Do defendants' rights too often trump the victims' rights for retribution? Or are the rights of the accused important to preserve justice?

6. Is retribution, the book's title, the proper goal of a criminal justice system? Are other goals at stake?

7. Did the ending surprise you? Or did you anticipate it? Some readers say they knew it was coming...if that was true for you, at what point did you figure it out?

8. Do you think justice was served in this case? Why and why not? What, in your definition, is justice? Can you define it?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Return
Victoria Hislop, 2008 (U.S., 2009)
HarperCollins
404 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061715419

Summary
From the internationally bestselling author of The Island comes a dazzling new novel of family betrayals, forbidden love, and historical turmoil.

Sonia knows nothing of Granada's shocking past, but ordering a simple cup of coffee in a quiet café will lead her into the extraordinary tale of a family's fight to survive the horror of the Spanish Civil War.

Seventy years earlier, in the Ramírez family's café, Concha and Pablo's children relish an atmosphere of hope. Antonio is a serious young teacher, Ignacio a flamboyant matador, and Emilio a skilled musician. Their sister, Mercedes, is a spirited girl whose sole passion is dancing, until she meets Javier and an obsessive love affair begins. But Spain is a country in turmoil. In the heat of civil war, everyone must take a side and choose whether to submit, to fight, or to attempt escape. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Bromley, Kent, England, UK
• Raised—Tonbridge, England
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Sissinghurst, England

Victoria Hislop writes travel features for The Sunday Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday, along with celebrity profiles for Woman & Home. She lives in Kent, England, with her husband and their two children. (From the publisher.)

More
Born in Bromley (Kent), Victoria Hislop (nee Hamson) grew up in Tonbridge. She read English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and worked in publishing and as a journalist before becoming an author.

In 1988 she married Private Eye editor Ian Hislop in Oxford. They have two children, Emily Helen and William David, and live in Sissinghurst.

Hislop's first novel, The Island (2005), which the Sunday Express hailed as "the new Captain Corelli's Mandolin" was a Number 1 Bestseller in the UK, selling more than 1 million copies. According to her website, she rejected a Hollywood film offer (worth £300,000) for the novel. Instead, she offered the rights to Mega, a Greek television channel, for a fraction of the fee. Her desire was "to preserve the integrity of the book and to give something back to the Mediterranean island on which it is based."

The Return, her second novel, a sequel set in Spain, has also been a success and was followed by The Thread in 2012.

In 2009, she donated the short story "Aflame in Athens" to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project—four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the Fire collection. ("More" adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)

Book Reviews
For her follow-up to international bestseller The Island, British author Hislop has friends Sonia and Maggie jetting off for flamenco lessons in Granada, Spain. Sonia is escaping monotony and a souring marriage to an older man while Maggie is celebrating her 35th birthday. The trip proves an odyssey of discovery for Sonia, who over a morning cup of coffee is mesmerized by an elderly cafe owner's stories of the Spanish Civil War and the Ramirez family who once owned the cafe and were torn apart during the time of Franco and the upheaval of war. Most intriguing was the story of Mercedes, whose passion for flamenco dancing was matched only by her love for renowned guitarist Javier Montero with whom she performed. Separated from her fractured family, she set out to search for Javier in the chaos of Civil War Spain. Dance holds a place of importance in the tale, especially when Sonia learns the truth about her own mother in a twist that adds suspense to the romance and familial drama. The well-done historical background is a rewarding plus in this fast-paced account of love's power through generations.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. "In the picture book of marriage, they were the perfect married couple. It was a story told for an audience." What does this extract tell us about Sonia and James's relationship? What changes between them as the novel progresses? Is James a villain? What tactics does he employ to control Sonia?

2. Why are music and dance so important to the characters in The Return? What does the way a character dances say about them and their relationships? Why is Sonia so drawn to flamenco in particular, and why does James disapprove of her dance classes so vehemently?
"
3. "We need real men in this country.... Spain will never be strong while it's full of fairies." What image of masculinity do the Ramírez males—and the other men in the book —present? Is maleness portrayed as a good or bad thing? How do women exert their power?

4. Did you identify any family traits that ran through the Ramírez generations? Does Sonia take after her father or her mother, or any of her other relations?

5. "For Ignacio, there was a distinction between what he regarded as being a casual informer and actually being an assassin." Why does Ignacio make this distinction? Is it an accurate one? Where else in the novel are we invited to compare physical violence with more subtle forms of cruelty?

6. 'The saints and martyrs with their painted on blood and theatrical stigmata had once been part of her life. Now she saw the church as a sham, a cupboard full of redundant props'. Why does Mercedes lose her faith? How does The Return portray religion and particularly the Catholic Church?

7. What does this book have to say about friendship? Is blood thicker than water?

8. "The lack of truth in [Concha and Mercedes'] correspondence did not mean there was no love between them. It merely meant that they loved each other enough to want to protect the other party." Who else withholds information in the novel, and why? What is the role of these secrets or non-disclosures? How do they affect the plot?

9. What did you make of Javier and Mercedes' relationship? Is it a childish infatuation, a survival tactic, a "fathomless love," or what?

10. What does The Return have to say about politics? To what extent does it affect real life? Did you detect a political bias to this book? If so, what is it?

11. What is the relevance of bull fighting in The Return? Does it tell us anything about Spanish culture or the Civil War more generally? Is it relevant that Republican citizens are assassinated in Granada's bullring and that Ignacio is hunted and killed like a bull? If so, why?

12. How does the history of the Ramírez family represent the Spanish Civil War more generally? Do you find their story a good way of conveying the history of the Civil War? Is Victoria Hislop successful in melding fact and fiction together?

13. "Antonio discovered that there was nothing more brutalising than to drive a bayonet into another human being and in this killing he felt part of himself die too." How does Antonio's perspective on killing compare to Ignacio's, and to other characters'? Were you surprised by the novel's violence? How does Victoria Hislop treat the subject of death in her writing?

14. Whose story did you enjoy most? Did the different strands hang well together, do you think?

15. "On his outstretched hand lay nothing more than a small mound of dirt, a pathetic sample of Spain's soil that he had brought with him over the mountains." What does this old man's gesture tell us about the emigrant experience? How do other characters in the book think about exile and home?

16. If you have read The Island, what similarities and differences did you identify between the two novels? Are there any plot and structure devices common to both? How do the two heroines, Sonia and Alexis, compare?
(Questions issued by publlisher.)

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Return to Sullivans Island
Dorothea Benton Frank, 2009
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061891755

Summary
Dorothea Benton Frank returns to the enchanted landscape of South Carolina's Lowcountry made famous in her beloved New York Times bestseller Sullivans Island to tell the story of the next generation of Hamiltons and Hayes.

Newly graduated from college, aspiring writer Beth Hayes is elected by her family to house-sit the Island Gamble. Buoyed by sentimental memories of growing up on this tiny sandbar seemingly untouched by time, Beth vows to give herself over to the Lowcountry force and discover the wisdom it holds. Just as she vows she will never give into the delusional world of white picket fences, minivans, and eternal love, she meets Max Mitchell. All her convictions and plans begin to unravel with lightning speed.

There is so much about life and her family's past that she does not know. Her ignorance and naivete nearly cost her both her inheritance and her family's respect, but Beth finds unexpected friends to help her through the disaster she faces. If everything happens for a reason, then Beth's return to Sullivans Island teaches her that betrayal and tragedy are most easily handled when you surround yourself with loyal family and friends in a magical place that loves you so much it wants to claim you as its own. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—Sullivan's Island, North Carolina, USA
• Education—Fashion Institute of America
• Currently—lives in New Jersey and on Sullivan Island

An author who has helped to put the South Carolina Lowcountry on the literary map, Dorothea Benton Frank hasn't always lived near the ocean, but the Sullivan's Island native has a powerful sense of connection to her birthplace. Even after marrying a New Yorker and settling in New Jersey, she returned to South Carolina regularly for visits, until her mother died and she and her siblings had to sell their family home. "It was very upsetting," she told the Raleigh News & Observer. "Suddenly, I couldn't come back and walk into my mother's house. I was grieving."

After her mother's death, writing down her memories of home was a private, therapeutic act for Frank. But as her stack of computer printouts grew, she began to try to shape them into a novel. Eventually a friend introduced her to the novelist Fern Michaels, who helped her polish her manuscript and find an agent for it.

Published in 2000, Frank's first "Lowcountry tale," Sullivan's Island made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Its quirky characters and tangled family relationships drew comparisons to the works of fellow southerners Anne Rivers Siddons and Pat Conroy (both of whom have provided blurbs for Frank's books). But while Conroy's novels are heavily angst-ridden, Frank sweetens her dysfunctional family tea with humor and a gabby, just-between-us-girls tone. To her way of thinking, there's a gap between serious literary fiction and standard beach-blanket fare that needs to be filled.

"I don't always want to read serious fiction," Frank explained to The Sun News of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "But when I read fiction that's not serious, I don't want to read brain candy. Entertain me, for God's sake." Since her debut, she has faithfully followed her own advice, entertaining thousands of readers with books Pat Conroy calls "hilarious and wise" and characters Booklist describes as "sassy and smart,."

These days, Frank has a house of her own on Sullivan's Island, where she spends part of each year. "The first thing I do when I get there is take a walk on the beach," she admits. Evidently, this transplanted Lowcountry gal is staying in touch with her soul.

Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:

• Before she started writing, Frank worked as a fashion buyer in New York City. She is also a nationally recognized volunteer fundraiser for the arts and education, and an advocate of literacy programs and women's issues.

• Her definition of a great beach read—"a fabulous story that sucks me in like a black hole and when it's over, it jettisons my bones across the galaxy with a hair on fire mission to convince everyone I know that they must read that book or they will die."

• When asked about her favorite books, here is what she said:

After working your way through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, of course, you have to read Gone with the Wind a billion times, then [tackle these authors].

The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley; The Red Tent by Anita Diamant; Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler; Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King; Making Waves and The Sunday Wife by Cassandra King; Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons; Rich in Love, Fireman's Fair, Dreams of Sleep, and Nowhere Else on Earth (all three) by Josephine Humphrey. (Author bio and interview from Barnes and Noble.)

Book Reviews
Frank brings to vivid life the rich landscape and its unpretentious folks.... A reader need only close her eyes for a moment to feel that thick-sticky heat, smell the wild salt marshes.
Atlanta Journal-Consistution

Frank (Sullivan's Island) creates a world in which aspiring writer Beth Hayes, whose chirpy internal monologues and quiet uncertainties make her easily endearing, is as much a character as the house she lives in. After graduating from college in Boston, Beth returns to the South to spend a year house-sitting her family's home, Island Gamble, while her mother, Susan, visits Paris. Frank's portrayal of a large and complicated family is humorous and precise: there's Susan, adoring and kind; Aunt Maggie, a stickler for manners; twin aunts Sophie and Allison, who run an exercise-and-vitamin empire; and uncles Timmy and Henry, the latter of whom has ties to Beth's trust fund. Frank's lovable characters occasionally stymie her pace; there's almost no room left for Beth's friends or her love affairs with sleazy Max Mitchell and cherubic Woody Morrison, though these become important later on. Frank is frequently funny, and she weaves in a dark undercurrent that incites some surprising late-book developments. Tight storytelling, winsomely oddball characters and touches of Southern magic make this a winner.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions
1. Sullivans Island and the Island Gamble are very special to Dorothea Benton Frank and her characters. What does the island and their beloved home mean to the Hamilton and Hayes families? What does it mean to Beth? Do you have a special place—or a special retreat—of your own? If not, what kind of "Island Gamble" would you want? What would you call it?

2. When she returns from college in Boston, Beth remarks on how Sullivans Island has changed. Has your own hometown changed? If so, how? How do you feel about those changes?

3. When she arrives on Sullivans Island, Beth has some interesting thoughts about the place. "In her heart she felt the island really belonged to her mother's generation and those before her." BY the novel's end, do you think Beth has made her own claim to the island? Why?

4. The Hamilton/Hayes are extraordinarily close. What benefits does such closeness offer? Can there be a downside to being so close? How does this closeness influence Beth as she grows into a woman? How does Beth see her family and her role in it? What factors influence her viewpoint? How does distance affect her perspective: both her own, going to college in Boston, and her mother Susan's when she goes to Paris?

5. Beth also muses about her family: "The last four years had prepared her to live her own life, independent of her tribe. Isn't that why she went to college a thousand miles away in the first place?" Is that the purpose of college? Is Beth more or less independent by the story's end?

6. Describe Beth's relationship with the women in her life: her mother, Susan, her aunts Maggie and Sophie, her friend Cecily, even her editor Barbara Farlie, their importance to her and how they shape her.

7. Determined to do her duty to the family, Beth's "intention was to avoid any and all controversy and every kind of chaos." Why does it seem that the best of intentions often go awry?

8. Beth was long wary of intimacy with men. "In her mind there was nothing more dangerous that what her mother called love." How does this mindset affect her when she meets Max Mitchell? Discuss Beth's affair with him. Why is she attracted to him?

9. What does Beth think about Woody Morrison? How do her relationships with Max and Woody contrast? What does each man offer her?

10. Beth and Susan both lost their fathers at a young age. How does this loss color different aspects of their lives?

11. Susan had always dreamed of living in Paris, but circumstances cut her stay short. Yet Susan isn't disappointed. Why? Is it always better to realize our dreams? Is there a benefit in leaving some unfilled?

12. Dorothea Benton Frank has a gift for bringing the wild beauty and magic of the Lowcountry to life. How do you picture the Lowcountry? Is it a place you'd like to visit? If you have been there, how do your impressions compare to those in the novel?

13. One of the charms of the Island Gamble is that it is haunted. Do you believe in ghosts? Have you had any interesting experiences with the supernatural?

14. The author touches on the subject of race with grace and compassion. As Beth enjoys her close friendship with Cecily she thinks of the strictures placed upon her mother and Cecily's grandmother, Livvie. How else have changing social mores freed us over the years?

15. Family, independence, love, marriage, race, heartbreak, acceptance, trust, and change, are all themes interwoven in the novel. Using examples from the book, explain the role of each and how they evolve in the story's arc.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Returned
Jason Mott, 2013
Harlequin/MIRA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780778315339

Summary
Harold and Lucille Hargrave's lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966. In their old age they've settled comfortably into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time.

Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep—flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old. All over the world people's loved ones are returning from beyond. No one knows how or why this is happening, whether it's a miracle or a sign of the end.

Not even Harold and Lucille can agree on whether the boy is real or a wondrous imitation, but one thing they know for sure: he's their son. As chaos erupts around the globe, the newly reunited Hargrave family finds itself at the center of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a mysterious new reality and a conflict that threatens to unravel the very meaning of what it is to be human.

With spare, elegant prose and searing emotional depth, award-winning poet Jason Mott explores timeless questions of faith and morality, love and responsibility. One of the most highly acclaimed novels of the year, The Returned is an unforgettable story that marks the arrival of an important new voice in contemporary fiction. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—Bolton, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., University of North Carolina,
Wilmington
• Currently—lives in southeastern North Carolina

Jason Mott lives in southeastern North Carolina. He has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals, and he was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize award. Entertainment Weekly listed him as one of their 10 “New Hollywood: Next Wave” people to watch.

Mott is the author of two poetry collections: We Call This Thing Between Us Love and “…hide behind me…” His debut novel, The Returned, was published in 2013 in over 13 languages and became a New York Times Bestseller. A film adaptation will air on ABC-TV in March, 2014, under the title Resurrection. (Adapted from the author's webiste.)

Book Reviews
Jason Mott's impressive debut novel...is a tense and touching treatise on life, death and life again.
USA Today

(Starred review.) In his exceptional debut novel, poet Mott brings drama, pathos, joy, horror, and redemption to a riveting tale of how the contemporary world handles the inexplicable reappearance of the dead. The primary focus is on Harold and Lucille Hargrave, who lost their son, Jacob, half a century ago.... Mott brings depth and poignancy to the Returned and their purpose for existing.
Publishers Weekly

What if the dead came back to us on Earth? Would your loved one's reappearance be a blessing or a curse? All over the world, people are spontaneously rising from the dead.... Highly recommended for those who love a strong story that makes them think. —Katie Lawrence, Chicago
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Mott brings a singularly eloquent voice to this elegiac novel, which not only fearlessly tackles larger questions about mortality but also insightfully captures life's simpler moments....A beautiful meditation on what it means to be human.
Booklist

(Starred review.) The world, a community, and an elderly couple are confused and disconcerted when people who have died inexplicably come back, including the couple's 8-year-old son, whom they lost nearly 50 years ago. No one understands why people who died are coming back.... Mott has written a breathtaking novel that navigates emotional minefields with realism and grace.
Kirkus Reviews

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Returning to Earth
Jim Harrison, 2007
Grove/Atlantic
280 pp.
ISBN-13: 780802143310

Summary
Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "a master … who makes the ordinary extraordinary, the unnamable unforgettable," beloved author Jim Harrison returns with a masterpiece — a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and finding redemption in unlikely places.

Slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease, Donald, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, begins dictating family stories he has never shared with anyone, hoping to preserve history for his children. The dignity of Donald's death and his legacy encourages his loved ones to find a way to redeem — and let go of — the past, whether through his daughter's emersion in Chippewa religious ideas or his mourning wife's attempt to escape the malevolent influence of her own father.

A deeply moving book about origins and endings, and how to live with honor for the dead, Returning to Earth is one of the finest novels of Harrison's long, storied career, and will confirm his standing as one of the most important American writers now working. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— December 11, 1937
• Where—Grayling, Michigan, USA
• Education—Michigan State University
• Awards—National Endowment for the Arts grant;
Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Michigan, New Mexico, Montana

Jim Harrison is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and writings about food. His work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Outside, Playboy, Men's Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. He has published several collections of novellas, including Legends of the Fall (1979), which contained two that were eventually turned into films: Revenge (1990) and Legends of the Fall (1994).

He has written over twenty-five books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including four volumes of novellas, The Beast God Forgot to Invent, Legends of the Fall, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, and Julip; seven other novels, The Road Home, Wolf, A Good Day to Die, Farmer, Warlock, Sundog, and Dalva; ten collections of poetry, including most recently Braided Creek, with Ted Kooser, and The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems; and three works of nonfiction, Just Before Dark, The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand, and the memoir Off to the Side.

Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely populated regions of North America with many stories set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Montana's mountains.

The winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, he has had his work published in twenty-two languages. (Adapted from Wikipedia and the publisher.)

Book Reviews
As a rough rule, it seems that writers fall into two camps. There are those who delight in rousting the truth from its concealment amid pieties and convention. If they must strip-mine the world to expose its hypocrisy, they will do so, even if they leave a landscape barren of hope. Then there are those writers who prefer to remythologize life on earth, finding it rich with strange congruences and possibilities. Jim Harrison is a writer of the second type, and Returning to Earth is his extraordinary valediction to mourning. It sharpens one’s appetite for life even at its darkest.
Will Blythe - The New York Times

Dying at 45 of Lou Gehrig's disease, Donald, who is Chippewa-Finnish, dictates his family story to his wife, Cynthia, who records this headlong tale for their two grown children (and also interjects). Donald's half-Chippewa great-grandfather, Clarence, set out from Minnesota in 1871 at age 13 for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In Donald's compellingly digressive telling, Clarence worked the farms and mines of the northern Midwest, and arrived in the Marquette, Mich., area 35 years later. As Donald weaves the tale of his settled life of marriage and fatherhood with that of his restless ancestors, he reveals his deep connection to an earlier, wilder time and to a kind of people who are "gone forever." The next three parts of the novel, each narrated by a different member of Donald's family, relate the story of Donald's death and its effects. While his daughter, Clare, seeks solace in Donald's Anishnabeg religion, Cynthia and her brother, David, use Donald's death to come to terms with the legacy of their alcoholic father. The rambling narrative veers away from the epic sweep of Harrison's Legends of the Fall, and Donald's reticence about the role religion plays in his life dilutes its impact on the story. But Harrison's characters speak with a gripping frankness and intimacy about their own shortcomings, and delve into their grief with keen sympathy.
Publishers Weekly

Time, memory, and the land all play key roles in Harrison's remarkable new novel, set, like much of his work (e.g., True North), in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. At the center of the story is Donald, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. His dignity, presence, and approach to life, deeply influenced by Native American culture and spirituality, have had a powerful effect on his family, and the novel is largely concerned with his feelings about his impending demise and his family's reactions to it. Along with the example of his life, his legacy is a family history he dictates to his wife, Cynthia, during his last days in order to preserve what memories he can for those who remain, including children Clare and Herald. After his death, the family must come to terms with how he has affected their lives and find their own ways both to honor him and to let him go. A deeply felt meditation on life and death, nature and God, this is one of Harrison's finest works. Recommended for all public libraries. —Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Library Journal

Meditations on mortality and quasi-incestuous desire inform this thoughtful, occasionally rambling novel. Making his fictional return to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Harrison (True North, 2004, etc.) tells the story of a death and its aftermath through four different narrators. The first is Donald, a man of mixed Chippewa-Finnish blood, who reflects on his life as he suffers through the final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease. He's a 45-year-old man of deep spirituality and profound dignity, and he's determined to assume control over his last days. The final section's narrator is Cynthia, Donald's wife, who is still trying to come to terms with his death five months later. He had enriched her life in ways that her wealthy family never could, and she had married him because he was so unlike her pedophile father. These sections are by far the novel's strongest, leaving the reader to wonder how and why Harrison chose the two narrators in the middle. One is K, a free spirit with a Mohawk haircut, who is the stepson of Cynthia's brother, David. K helps Donald through his last days, while sleeping with Donald's daughter, Clare, and lusting after her mother. Though the familial ties are too close for comfort, Cynthia occasionally feels twinges of desire for her daughter's cousin/lover as well. The weakest section of the novel is narrated by David, who hasn't been able to come to terms with unearned wealth as well as his sister has, and whose life balances good works with mental instability. It seems that their disgraced father has somehow influenced both David's character and his fate. As the last three narrators resume their lives after Donald's death, it appears to each of them that his spirit has not died with him and perhaps is now inhabiting a bear. Studying Chippewa spirituality, daughter Clare comes to believe this most strongly, which makes one wonder why she and perhaps her brother weren't narrators instead of K and David. Death remains a mystery, as Harrison explores the meaning it gives to life.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. As in his previous works of fiction, Jim Harrison chronicles life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a rugged landscape of thick forests filled with bear and deer. Begin your discussion of this novel by considering how this untamed backdrop affects and shapes his characters’ lives on both a physical and spiritual level. Consider the vast expanse of Lake Superior as well as the extreme climate of harsh winters and hot mosquito-filled summers–how might this influence people to be constantly at the mercy of nature?

2. K. describes Donald’s story as “what William Faulkner called ‘the raw meat on the floor’” (p. 98). What does he mean by this statement? What is it about Donald’s character and the way in which he lives that generates such respect and admiration among his family members? How far do you agree with the statement that “I never knew anyone who so thoroughly was what he was” (p. 162)? Would you describe anyone else’s story in the novel as “the raw meat on the floor?”

3. Donald’s attitude toward his death is stoic and without self-pity: “I think you’re better off understanding things like this than simply being pissed off” (p. 25). Talk about the importance of his religion in his ability to remain strong throughout his illness and the preparations for his suicide. Why is he so private about his religion? Trace the influences of his past on his personal brand of religion: take into accounts his months spent with Flower as a child, his Indian Chippewa heritage, his work ethic, and his reverence for nature.

4. What do we learn about Donald through his admission of his plan to murder a childhood enemy? Does your impression of him change? For the better or the worse?

5. Donald states “my own father’s solution for the hard knocks of life was to work too hard and that’s also been a downfall of my own” (p. 46). Identify and explain the ways in which work and the need to work appear in the novel: think about the contrast between Cynthia’s father and Donald’s father, about David’s teaching position in Mexico and what it means to him, as well as Cynthia’s decision to move away to find meaningful work. Find instances where mental well-being depends on physical exertion and, in contrast, where a lack of physical activity hinders intellectual thought.

6. As Donald recounts his family history to his wife, Cynthia, he seems to discover or rediscover a deep connection to his ancestors, especially with his great-grandfather, the first Clarence. How are the two of them alike? Consider Donald’s empathy for Clarence losing his beloved horse, Sally, stating that “I understand his feelings because I have lost my body” (p. 26). Even before the telling of these stories, what are some of the ways in which Donald has passed down his Indian heritage to his children?

7. In relating a moving story about a raven funeral, Donald muses about his own death (p. 71). How is his death similar to the raven’s passing? Discuss the author’s portrayal of Donald’s final moments, narrated by K. in one short paragraph in fairly clinical terms. Was the brevity of this description surprising to you or did it resonate with deeper, unspoken emotion? Did you want to see the family’s immediate reactions to the death or were you content to give them their privacy and imagine for yourself?

8. “We’ve been so inept and careless about death in America and have paid big for the consequences” (p. 226). What do you think this statement means and how far would you agree with it?

9. Death and attitudes toward it obviously play a central role in this novel. David states: “Death gives us a shove into a new sort of landscape” (p. 166) while Cynthia questions, “What’s an appropriate response to death?” (p. 228). Briefly consider the different characters’ responses to Donald’s death. Given what we know of their personalities does anyone’s reaction surprise you? Does anyone manage to act as Donald hoped? – “You can remember me but let me go?” (p. 228).

10. Why do you think Clare feels the need to immerse herself in Chippewa ideas on death after her father’s passing? Why is she drawn to Flower instead of her own mother? Is there a parallel between her feelings for Flower and those of her father’s feelings for Flower? How realistic do you find her responses?

11. Consider the ways in which Cynthia deals with Donald’s death. Why is she unable to help Clare? Discuss the parallels of learning to let go as a mother with letting someone go in death.

12. Donald’s death serves as a catalyst of sorts for David and gives him the strength to seek out Vera, the girl he loved twenty years earlier. Why do you think he is able to put the past behind him now?

13. Herald and Clare, Donald and Cynthia’s children, are strikingly dissimilar in character. Find instances of this dissimilarity and discuss how their character traits prepare them for handling their father’s illness and death. Do they step out of their expected roles at all? In many ways they mirror the difference that exists between Cynthia and her brother David, even K. and his sister, Rachel. What might these differences tell us about human nature?

14. David is a fascinating character, balancing his life between the wilds of his cabin and the remote poverty of Mexican villages. K. states, “David had spent his life nearly suffocated by ambiguities” (p. 137). How far would you agree with this statement? Central to his being is the need to make reparations for wrongs committed by his family over the last century. How do his survival kits for Mexican illegal immigrants fit into this picture? At one point he is advised to “cast your role as a screwdriver rather than a tank” (p. 187) in his humanitarian efforts. How far could this statement apply to his personal life too?

15. Fathers and father figures play an important role throughout the novel. Consider Cynthia’s attitude toward her father as a girl and its influence on her falling in love with Donald. Does her attitude toward her father and his monstrous act of raping Vera change over the course of the novel? What does she discover about his experience in the war, and does her knowledge bring any conclusions? What do we learn about David’s relationship with his father, and how has this affected his life? Who were father figures for Cynthia and her brother David? What about K? Talk about the four father figures in his life.

16. What are your impressions of the author’s portrayal of love in the novel? Consider the reasons for Donald and Cynthia’s deep and lasting love, which started in the most unlikely of circumstances. K. reflects with anger on “the randomness of love” (p. 105), which makes him love Cynthia more than Clare. Discuss the different relationships presented in the novel and consider the role played by “randomness.”

17. Discuss how the novel explores the idea of history, especially through the characters of David and Donald. David compares the destructive nature of Donald’s disease to his own “dithering obsession with the destructiveness of history” (p. 149). What do you think he means by this and is it a fair analogy to make? How does his preoccupation with history impact his life? Consider both the positive and negative ways. Talk about Donald’s attitude toward history. Why do you think he states “I like the stories with people myself” (p. 6)?

18. We learn, quite surprisingly, that Donald was jealous of David’s vivid animal-filled dreams (p. 119) but Donald seems to have had many striking dreams himself. Identify examples of dream images that have special importance in the novel. Consider the dream of the first Clarence that led him to a horse farm. How does Cynthia follow in his footsteps at the end of the novel? Given that dreaming occurs when the mind is in a state of subconsciousness, could Donald’s three days on the mountain fit into the dream category? What are some of the visions he experienced during his fast and how are they relevant to the rest of the novel?

19. As you will have noted, bears appear in dreams throughout the novel, and from Donald’s first mention of bad dreams about flying bears as a child, it is evident that bears will play a major role in the book. Consider the implications of the statement that “a bear is just a bear” in terms of understanding Donald’s religion. Find instances of the prevalence of bears in daily life in the Upper Peninsula. and discuss the spiritual importance of bears in Chippewa lore. How do different family members react to the possibility of Donald’s soul migrating into a bear’s body? What realization occurs at the very end of the novel when Cynthia and Clare sight a bear together? Has Cynthia changed since Donald’s death? What might this mean for her relationship with her daughter?

20. Discuss how the novel portrays man’s symbiotic relationship with nature. Consider the ways in which Donald and his family bring nature into their lives, indeed need nature in order to live life fully, and find instances where people show a lack of reverence toward nature and animals. When Donald spends his three days in the wilderness he finds his place in the world and recounts “I was able to see how creatures including insects looked at me rather than just how I saw them” (p. 70). Given what we know about the importance of nature in the characters’ lives, what might K.’s sister, Rachel, represent in the novel?

21. At the end of the novel Cynthia discovers what Camus refers to as “terrible freedom” (p. 274). What is this, and why does it fill Cynthia with “vertigo”? Do you think she will survive in Montana?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Returns and Exchanges
Yuri Kruman, 2013
Author House
426 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781491813843

Summary
Five young New Yorkers brought together on the verge of greatness—by the chance of fate—do battle to transcend through pangs of City grit and pleasure, to achieve.

Helen, a modern woman caught between professions, men and fears, has a stark choice to make. Jacob, a violin prodigy, frantically writes a symphony to win his love and prove himself. Conrad, ambitious Texan in New York, catches a break beyond his wildest dreams, with just one caveat. A childhood sin he can't expunge takes playboy-at-his-peak Lisandro from dream life to damning nightmare, half a world away. Senator's son and journalist Aidan risks everything for story that will make him great.

In the dark heart of Africa, against the Russian winter and the heel of influence, in the East-West bazaar of choice and genius mind of Jacob Frenkel, the mettle of a generation will be forged.

Author Bio
• Birth—April 13, 1983
• Where—Moscow, Russia
• Raised—Lexington, Kentucy, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania; J.D.,
Benjamin Cardozo School of Law
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Yuri Kruman was born in Moscow and, at the age of nine, moved to Kentucky where he grew up. He studied neuroscience and anthropology at University of Pennsylvania before receiving his law degree from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has worked on Wall Street and in healthcare. He lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Visit the author on Goodreads.

Discussion Questions
1. List some of the classical and modern euphemisms for European/"Western" civilization found in the book

2. What are some of Jacob Frenkel's motivations for writing a symphony?

3. What would one conclude about millenials from this book?

4. Is Conrad's experience in New York a wild success, a sell-out's dream, just plain fate, or all of the above?

5. What do we learn about the creative process from Jacob Frenkel's experience in writing a symphony?

6. How does a modern woman like Helen Silkin manage to navigate the multiple pressures of professional success, marriage, her parents' immigrant dreams, pressures on an only child, desire to see and experience the world, plus the weight of generations and her own idea of what success entails? Does she, indeed, manage?

7. What does it take for a famous man's son to step out from his shadow? Can he ever?

8. What are we to learn, if anything, about the ever-dying, beleaguered Western civilization from the events of Berlin in this book that New York fails to teach?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)

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A Reunion of Ghosts
Judith Claire Mitchell, 2015
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062355881

Summary
Three wickedly funny sisters . . . One family's extraordinary legacy . . . A single suicide note that spans a century . . .

Meet the Alter sisters: Lady, Vee, and Delph. These three mordantly witty, complex women share their family's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

They love each other fiercely, but being an Alter isn't easy. Bad luck is in their genes, passed down through the generations. Yet no matter what curves life throws at these siblings—and it's hurled plenty—they always have a wisecrack, and one another.

In the waning days of 1999, the trio decides it's time to close the circle of the Alter curse. But first, as the world counts down to the dawn of a new millennium, Lady, Vee, and Delph must write the final chapter of a saga lifetimes in the making—one that is inexorably intertwined with that of the twentieth century itself.

Unspooling threads of history, personal memory, and family lore, they weave a mesmerizing account of their lives that stretches back decades to their great-grandfather, a brilliant scientist whose professional triumph became the sinister legacy that defines them.

Funny, heartbreaking, and utterly original, A Reunion of Ghosts is a magnificent novel about three unforgettable women bound to each other, and to their remarkable family, through the blessings and the burdens bestowed by blood. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Rasied—on Long Island, New York
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in Madison, Wisconsin

Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novels The Last Day of the War (2004) and A Reunion of Ghosts (2015). She teaches undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is a professor of English and the director of the MFA program in creative writing.

She has received grants and fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Bread Loaf, among others. She lives in Madison with her husband, the artist Don Friedlich.). (From the publisher.)

Visit the author's website for a delightful, more personal version of her bio.

Book Reviews
What’s so funny about three sisters bent on committing suicide? Plenty, in the imagination of Judith Claire Mitchell…. Darkly witty.
Dallas Morning News

Mitchell’s plot, which twists in unexpected but believable ways and opens up just when it seems as it the same time—that makes it remarkable.
Columbus Dispatch

Mitchell explores the mixed-blessing bonds of family with wry wit. This original tale is black comedy at its best (Book of the Week).
People

My favourite novel of the year so far…. A literary mash-up of The Virgin Suicides and Grey Gardens. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are slugging it out for the film rights already.
Sam Baker - Harper's Bazaar.com (UK)

(Starred review.) [T]riumphant...darkly comic prose..... Lady, Delph, and Vee Alter decide to kill themselves..... Moving nimbly through time and balancing her weightier themes with the sharply funny, fiercely unsentimental perspectives...Mitchell’s fictional suicide note is poignant and pulsing with life force.
Publishers Weekly

Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter...have given themselves the "deadline" of late December 1999 to commit suicide. Their reasons are based mostly on that the Alters have miserable luck, stretching back to their great-grandfather.... [T]his serious study of a very odd family has its darkly humorous side. —Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA
Library Journal

For the Alter sisters, living with the guilt of the generations, there is only one way out…. This novel is a carefully crafted, thought-provoking examination of history past and present as seen through the eyes of a complex yet humble family.
Booklist

(Starred review.) [A] memoir that's meant to double as their collective suicide note may not sound like a hilarious premise for a novel, but Mitchell's masterful family saga is as funny as it is aching.... Mitchell's dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy...with deep empathy and profound wit.... [S]tunning.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How does The Alter Family Tree affect your entry into the novel?

2. Consider each of the sisters—Lady, Vee and Delph—who narrate most of the novel. How are they similar and different? How is their living together healthy? How not?

3. In Chapter 1, the sisters present a "chart" of family suicides and claim that the "tidiness of the rows and columns" help balance the emotional feeling of "life as forever chaotic." Does it? Can organizing and listing difficult experiences make them less powerful?

4. What is potentially valuable or challenging about a family legacy?

5. Heinrich Alter states that "being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith." How do the other characters of the novel struggle with being Jews with German ancestry after World War II?

6. As a child, Lenz Alter was "mournful," and bad at most things he tried, yet he eventually wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. How does such a transformation take place?

7. How does the sisters’ humor and love of wordplay and puns balance the sadness and suffering explored in the novel?

8. Consider the structure of the novel, which moves backwards and forwards in time. What are the effects of this?

9. Albert Einstein’s theories about time serve as a way for the sisters to consider their largely unpleasant lives. What did Einstein say about the nature of time? How is that helpful to the sisters?

10. Delph, the youngest sister, at 19 years old, says she’s not interested in "soup," the sisters’ euphemism for romantic and sexual involvement with men. Why isn’t she? Consider Lady’s relationship with Joe Hopper and Vee’s with Eddie Glod.

11. In their wonderings about what might have happened to the father who left them, the sisters find the fantasy of his being killed by their mother the most satisfying and interesting. How might such a drastic fantasy make emotional sense? In what ways might fantasy be helpful in the face of great trauma?

12. What does the sisters' Great Grandmother Iris Emanuel bring to the novel? What’s the value of the letters she writes to chemistry professor Richard Lehrer, even after he has died?

13. The sisters believe they are the last Alters subject to the family curse --- "The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons to the third and fourth generations." What might this Biblical idea mean?

14. Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva talks to Iris about the challenge of being married to genius. How might great intelligence affect intimate relationships like marriage?

15. After the painful loss of Richard Lehrer, Iris passionately instructs her son Richard about surviving: "The worst happens, and people go on." And yet she takes her own life. How might you explain such conflict, such apparent hypocrisy?

16. Both Lenz Alter and Albert Einstein do profound scientific work that eventually provide a force for genocide. To what extent is each responsible? What ethical responsibilities should scientists have?

17. Thinking of both an ad for Lord & Taylor and the horrific image of clothes worn by Jews in concentration camps, Richard thinks "Thank God for the human capacity to hold both kinds of pajamas in our heads at once." What might he mean?

18. At one point Vee mimics and criticizes one of the many academics writing about Lenz and Iris. What is she upset about? To what extent should academic research involve empathy or emotional understanding? What are the limits of studying historic figures and their behavior?

19. After her bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy, Vee thinks about the "body as narrative," and the "face as biography." In what ways is this true?

20. In the face of Vee’s cancer the sisters claim that repression is a "gift," and of great value. To what extent can such profound pain and fear be "tamp[ed] down"?

21. What is the nature of coincidence? Fate? Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity?

(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Revenant
Michael Punke, 2002
Picador
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250072689

Summary
Punke's novel opens in 1823, two decades after the trailblazing expedition of Lewis and Clark, when thirty-six-year-old Hugh Glass joins the Rocky Mountain Fur Co. on a venture into perilous, unexplored territory.

A seasoned frontiersman, Glass is scouting ahead of the main troop when he is attacked and savagely mauled by a grizzly bear. His wounds are grievous—scalp nearly torn off, back deeply lacerated, throat clawed open—and he is unconscious when his fellow trappers find him.

Though they wait for Glass's death, he is still drawing breath three days later.

Facing hostile territory and the press of winter, the expeditions captain pays two volunteers—John Fitzgerald, a ruthless mercenary, and young Jim Bridger, the future "King of the Moutain Men"—to stay behind and bury Glass when his time comes. But the fidelity of these volunteers proves short-lived.

When Indians approach their camp, Fitzgerald and Bridger abandon Glass. Worse yet, they rob the wounded man of his rifle and knife, even his flint and steel—the very things that might have given him a chance on his own. Deserted, defenseless, and furious, Glass vows his survival. And his revenge. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 7, 1964
• Where—Torrington, Wyoming, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; J.D., Cornell University
• Currently—lives in Missoula, Montana

Michael Punke is a writer, novelist, professor, policy analyst, policy consultant, attorney and currently the Deputy United States Trade Representative and US Ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

He is best known for writing The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge (2002), which was adapted into film in 2015, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy.

Early life and education
The son of Butch Punke, a high school biology teacher and Marilyn Punke, Michael Punke grew up in Torrington, Wyoming with a younger brother named Tim and a sister named Amy, where they all engaged in various outdoor activities in the wilderness like fishing, hunting, hiking, shooting, and mountain biking

As a teenager, he spent at least three summers working at the Fort Laramie National Historic Site working as a "living history interpreter." He was also a debate team champion in high school, which he graduated early from to attend the University of Massachusetts Amherst, later transferring to George Washington University, where he graduated with a degree in International Affairs. He later attended and received his law degree from Cornell Law School, where he focused on trade law. He was elected Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell International Law Journal.

Career
After receiving his law degree, Punke worked in the 1990s as a government staffer for Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana). Specifically, from 1991-92, Punke served as International Trade Counsel to Baucus, who was also then Chairman of the National Finance Committee's International Trade Subcommittee. While working for Baucus, Punke met his wife Traci.

During 1993-95, Punke served at the White House as Director for International Economic Affairs and was jointly appointed to the National Economic Council and the National Security Council.

In 1995-96, Punke became a Senior Policy Advisor at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, where he advised on issues ranging from intellectual property law to trade and agricultural law. He also worked on international trade issues from the private sector, including as a partner at the Washington, D.C., office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe, & Maw. From 2003 to 2009, Punke consulted on public policy issues out of Missoula, Montana.

In 2009, President Barack Obama elected Punke to currently serve as the Deputy U.S. Trade Representative and U.S. Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva, Switzerland. Obama's election of Punke for this position was also confirmed by the U.S. Senate in 2011.

Writing
Punke is the author of The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge, which was published in 2002.

He allegedly came up with the idea for the novel after reading a couple of lines in a history book about real-life frontier fur trapper Hugh Glass. When he began writing the book in 1997, he would show up by 5:00 a.m. at the law office where he worked, write for roughly three hours, and then do his legal job for the next eight to ten hours. As part of the process, he conducted extensive research on Glass, including setting up and testing actual hunting traps.

The book took a total of four years to complete, and according to his brother Tim, Punke caught pneumonia at least four times during the writing process. When Revenant was finally published, in 2002, it received little fanfare. However, Director Alejandro G. Inarritu discovered the novel and, realizing its film potential, immediately purchased the rights. Inarritu championed it and eventually attracted other producers and directors. The film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy, was released in 2015.

Afterward, Punke relocated with his wife Traci and their two children to Missoula, Montana, where he worked part-time as a policy consultant and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Montana. He also finished two non-fiction books (and their screenplays):

2007 - Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. 2013 - Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917

Punke was also the historical correspondent for Montana Quarterly magazine. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/7/2016.)

Book Reviews
A superb revenge story.... Punke has added considerably to our understanding of human endurance and of the men who pushed west in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark--a significant feat.
Washington Post

A captivating tale of a singular individual.... Authenticity is exactly what The Revenant provides, in abundance.
Denver Post

One of the great tales of the nineteenth-century West.
Salt Lake Tribune

[P]ainfully gripping drama.... Glass survives against all odds and embarks on a 3,000-mile-long vengeful pursuit of his ignominious betrayers. Told in simple expository language, this is a spellbinding tale of heroism and obsessive retribution.
Publishers Weekly

The American West of the 1820s is a harsh and unforgiving place, something that experienced trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass knows all too well.... Verdict: A must-read for fans of Westerns and frontier fiction and recommended for anyone interested in stories that test the limit of how much the human body and spirit can endure. —Sarah Cohn, Manhattan Coll. Lib., Bronx, NY
Library Journal

Like any frontiersman, Hugh finds that he can't hope to survive, much less succeed, without the help of the Indians, and he soon acquires a knowledge of their ways and lore. Eventually, his former betrayers find themselves face to face with a Revenant—a man come back from the dead. A good adventure yarn, with plenty of historical atmosphere and local color.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. While Michael Punke was reading a book about the American West, he discovered a snippet about Hugh Glass. Fascinated by Glass’s story, he began to study his life and times, research that would find its way into his novel, The Revenant. How does the fact that many of the characters were real historical figures affect your reading? Would the novel have been as compelling if it had been entirely fictional?

2. While we live in much different times than Glass, grizzly bear attacks are not unheard of. If you were in Glass’s position, how would you have reacted? What could Glass have done differently?

3. After the bear attack renders Glass immobile and near death, the Captain asks his brigade for two volunteers to stay behind and tend to Glass until he passes. Bridger agrees to stay to "salve his wounded pride," and Fitzgerald stays solely for the extra money. Do you think Bridger’s reason to stay is any better than Fitzgerald?

4. Shortly after Glass is abandoned, he has a dream that he is attacked by a rattlesnake. When he wakes, he realizes it was just a dream, and he also discovers that his fever has broken. What could this dream represent?

5. As the novel progresses, Punke provides backstories for some of the central characters, including Glass, via flashback. We learn that Glass was once employed as a freighter captain for Rawsthorne & Sons’. After learning of his father’s death, Glass hops aboard a Spanish merchant ship to return to Philadelphia to tend to family matters. When the ship is captured by pirates, Glass decides that in order to survive he has little choice but to join the pirates. What does this action say about Glass? Even though he was held against his will, should he be considered a criminal?

6. Glass’s mother and fiance died while he was held by the pirates, so with no real reason to return to the east, he joins the Rocky Mountain Fur Company on their venture into the upper Missouri. Punke writes that Glass "could not explain or articulate his reasons" for joining, and that his reason for joining "was something that he felt more than understood." What could this mean? What did "The West" represent in America in Glass’s time? How has this representation changed over time?

7. During Glass’s time on the frontier, he is faced with many challenging situations. At several points, he has to do things that most of us living in 21st-century North America would find difficult, such as eating rodents and raw meat. Under the same circumstances do you think you would be able to eat rodents and raw meat? Are there any other things that Glass does in order to survive that 21st-century North Americans would find especially difficult?

8. Punke uses dreams as a device to gain insight into a character’s subconscious. Bridger has a dream that he is stabbed in the chest by a mysterious specter with the knife he stole from Glass. Who or what could this specter represent? Does Punke want readers to feel empathy for Bridger? If so, why?

9. At Fort Brazeau, Kiowa Brazeau shows Glass a map of Lewis and Clark’s explorations to which Kiowa has contributed details over the past decade. Punke tells us that "the recurrent theme [of the map] was water." Why were the locations of creeks and other water bodies so important?

10. Kiowa offers Glass a job at the fort, but Glass refuses. Kiowa tells Glass that he finds his quest for revenge to be a "bit of silly venture." Do you agree? Do you think Glass would have been able to survive the frontier alone without his burning desire for revenge?

11. Glass has a respect for Native Americans that is unusual for a white man of this period. How would you describe Glass’s relationship with the Native Americans? What is it about Glass’s approach and personality that allows for the diplomatic interactions he has with most of the Native Americans he encounters?

12. While on the mission to mend ties with the Arikara, Lengevin, Glass, and the rest of the crew are attacked by the Arikara. La Vierge is shot and his brother Dominique refuses to leave him. Glass feels he has no choice but to flee in order to ensure his own survival. Is his decision to leave the wounded behind any different from Fitzgerald’s and Bridger’s decision to leave him? If so, how?

13. When Glass finally manages to find Bridger at Fort Union, he immediately attacks him. However, Bridger does not fight back which compels Glass to end his assault. Why does Glass decide not to kill Bridger? Has Glass forgiven Bridger?

14. At Fort Atkinson Glass finally comes face-to-face with Fitzgerald. Glass, however, is not able to get the revenge he so desperately desires, as Major Constable decides that Fitzgerald will be tried in court. In the seemingly lawless frontier, a trial does seem odd, but is this move toward order and due process a positive and necessary one? Does Fitzgerald’s punishment fit his crime?

15. The novel closes with a conversation between Captain Henry and Bridger. Bridger asks the Captain for permission to join the group of men who are traveling over the Rocky Mountains. The Captain says he is free to go. Why do you think Punke gives the final scene to Bridger rather than Glass?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
Elizabeth Buchan, 2002
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142003725

Summary
For twenty-five years, Rose Lloyd has juggled marriage, motherhood, and career with remarkable success. It has been a life of family picnics, books and wine, a cherished house, and her own exquisitely designed garden-sunny and comfortable. But then the carefully managed life to which Rose has become accustomed comes crashing down around her when—over the course of a few days—her marriage and her career both fall apart.

Can Rose, whose anguish is barely softened by the ministrations of friends and grown children with their own problems, ever start over? Not easily. But it's amazing what prolonged reflection, the slimming effect of a lost appetite, a new slant on independence (and a little Parisian lingerie) will do. Especially when an old flame suddenly reappears.

Full of humor, clever insight, and a whimsical sense of the absurd, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is an irresistible and finely written fantasy for anyone who ever wondered what a certain age would look like from beyond the looking-glass-and who will find it ripe with promise that the best days are yet to come. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 21, 1948
• Where—Guildford, Surrey, England, UK
• Education—Uiversity of Kent at Canterbury
• Awards—Romantic Novelists' Assoc. Novel of the Year, 1994
(for Consider the Lily)
• Currently—lives in London, England

Elizabeth Buchan has seen success on both sides of the publishing fence. She began her career writing for Penguin, then took a job as a fiction editor at Random House. When she began writing for herself, she managed motherhood, writing and editing. Her medium is the romance novel, but Buchan produces much more than just escapist love stories. In an interview with iMagazine.com, she explains,

Romantic fiction is a wider, richer and more honorable tradition than it is given credit for. It includes some of the greatest novels ever written —Jane Eyre, Tess of the D'Urbevilles, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina.

Although Buchan is best known for her romance novels, her first book was actually a biography of one of the world's most beloved children's authors. Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit was released 1988. Written for young readers, the book covers Potter's extraordinary life, her art and her lasting contribution to children's literature.

Her first novel, Daughters of the Storm (1989), intertwines the fates of three women as the fate of a nation hangs in the balance. On the eve of the French Revolution, Sophie, Heloise and Marie each seek freedoms of their own — in love and society — and forge a friendship that will change their lives forever. In Light of the Moon (1991) Evelyn St. John is in occupied territory in France during World War II. When she meets and falls in love with someone who is supposed to be the enemy, political truths are redefined in the name of love.

London's Sunday Times called Buchan's third novel "the literary equivalent of the English country garden" when it was released in 1993. Consider the Lily is the story of two cousins —one rich, the other poor—and their competition for the love of the same man. Set against the backdrop of the English countryside in the years between the two world wars, the novel became an international bestseller and Buchan won the 1994 Romantic Novelists' Association Novel of the Year Award.

Eventually, after the success of Consider the Lily, the call to write became so loud that Buchan retired from her publishing career. Her fourth novel, Perfect Love (1996) also marks a shift in Buchan's novels. Her first three were historical romances, but with the fourth, characters and settings are brought into the 20th century. Here, Prue Valor has been in a proper English marriage with the much older Max for twenty years. Without explanation, but certainly with much guilt, Prue begins an affair with her stepdaughter's new husband (they are the same age) when they realize they cannot deny their attraction for each other. Living magazine said of the book, "The real battle in this novel is between raging passions and English restraint."

Set in the high-finance world of London in the 1980s, Against Her Nature (1997) tells the story of the fallout from being the subject of rumors of incompetence amid a devastating Lloyd's crash. Two women, Tess and Becky balance their fast-paced game of success with every opportunity afforded them, including children. In Secrets of the Heart (2000), four thirty-somethings have found love and must now find a way to hold on to it. Only two succeed in this clever story about the deals we make for love.

Buchan's next novel, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2003) was released to much critical acclaim. This is the story of what happens during the "happily ever after." Shocked at her husband's affair and the collapse of their marriage, Rose reviews the last twenty years of her life, remembers the carefree woman she used to be, and makes a triumphant decision to fight back by moving on. The book became a New York Times bestseller, film rights to the book were snatched up almost immediately, and the Boston Globe called it "a thoughtful, intelligent, funny, coming-of-middle-age story."

Questions of fulfillment are also the subject of 2004's The Good Wife. Fanny is the devoted woman behind a very public, very busy politician—yet her own ambitions disappeared somewhere along the way. Likewise, in Everything She Thought She Wanted (2005), two women must decide just how much happiness they can sacrifice in order to stay with their husbands.

In her earlier books, Buchan brought intelligence and depth to the historical romance novel. Her later books have also captured the hard choices women must make in love, in family and in society. With humor and intelligence, her contemporary characters are Bridget Jones aged 25 years, at the point where she has attained the life she sought so long ago, but finds that the searching never ends.

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Nobel interview:

• Buchan is married to a grandson of John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the famous 1915 spy thriller (and 1953 film) .

• Buchan reflects that "one of the great joys that hedges around the business of writing is making contact with other writers. I belong to a group that meets every month or so in a shabby old pub in north London, and we sit down to dinner, all of us writers, all of us totally absorbed by the problems, pleasures, and rewards of the process."

• When asked what book most influenced her life, here is what she answered:

Middlemarch by George Eliot. For me, the touchstone for the novel. Once read, the fictional construction of a small town in rural England in the early 19th century is impossible to forget. A truly mature work, infused by intellect and a vision of society, in which the author's sure, disciplined handling and analysis of human nature is perfectly poised, drawing together in a thematic whole the lives of the men and women who lie in "unvisited tombs."

Book Reviews
This Middle-Aged’ woman’s revenge is delightfully dishy. The "revenge" in the title has little to do with getting back at people. Rather, Buchan celebrates the patience and wisdom that only age brings. While middle-aged women will relish the novel, it's a cautionary tale for husbands with eyes glued to the pertly twitching buttox of that office minx. Beware. Better that aging first bride than the girlish tendril you seduced. She just might start craving what you thought you had escaped.
USA Today

It would be easy to turn Rose's story into a fantasy of revenge.... But what makes Buchan's take on the situation so appealing is that she sidesteps the expected plot devices. It takes more than misfortune, even if it is extreme, to change the basics of character. Rose never has been the kind of woman to brood on her hurts or to nurse a desire for revenge. It wouldn't be realistic for her anger and hurt to drive her in that direction now. Buchan skillfully brings the reader into Rose's days, and while there is anger there is also sadness, memories both bitter and sweet, and worries about the future.... Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is not about revenge as much as it is about change. It is a nicely written piece of chick lit that ends up being thought-provoking in its restraint.... This is a novel that is about a three-dimensional woman, not a stereotype, and she's a character that grows on the reader while she grows into a new stage of her life.
Denver Post

Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is an eye-catcher of the first degree—even if most of those eyes are starting to disappear into the folds of their faces.... I raced through [the book] like a woman two weeks late for her hair-color appointment...[it] is a guilty pleasure.
Rocky Mountain News

A must-read for Elizabeth Berg fans and anyone looking for a new perspective on love and starting over. —Carrie Bissey
Booklist

(Audio version.) Buchan's latest novel finds the carefully managed life of 48-year-old Rose Lloyd, a successful book review editor, turned upside down. First, her husband of 25 years announces he's leaving Rose for her own sexy assistant. Next, insult is added to injury: Rose is fired from her job and replaced by none other than the woman who broke up her marriage. Buchan lends a compelling emotional depth to her main characters, seamlessly merging Rose's struggle to rise above the betrayal, shock and fear of middle-aged "invisibility" with flashbacks to her youth, recollections of her first love to a now famed travel writer, memories of family vacations and her grown kids' childhood. With extensive stage and theater work to her credit, and incorporating myriad voices to the diverse cast, Gilpin makes the book's transition to a 10-hour unabridged audio format exceptionally smooth. Narrating mostly in a proper British accent, which perfectly suits Rose's "delight in domesticity" and enhances the book's dry, slightly askew sense of humor, Gilpin also captures the outrage of Rose's son and daughter (both of whom have their own relationship issues), the American drawl of her old flame (who makes an unexpected return), the grumpy rumblings of an elderly neighbor she cares for and the feisty opinions of her mother, making for a good production listeners will enjoy.
Publishers Weekly

Happy for 25 years, Rose watches aghast as both her career and her marriage suddenly go down the drain. A best seller in England that's slated for the post-Bridget Jones crowd
Library Journal

Britisher Buchan’s US debut, the story of a middle-aged wife who, when her life and marriage fall apart, manages to fight back, move on, even hope for something better. Rose Lloyd, book editor for a London paper, is happily married to Nathan, an executive on the paper, and the mother of two adult children, Sam and Poppy. Her life is probably as good as it gets, and though Rose isn’t complacent, she is certainly unprepared for the betrayals about to implode her life. Nathan announces he’s leaving and moving in with her trusted assistant, the younger and sexy Minty. Reeling, she learns next that she’s to be replaced as editor by Minty because her boss wants someone younger, with new ideas, running the book section. Her woes mount as she hears that her mother needs surgery and Nathan is no longer paying her medical insurance. Her much loved cat dies, daughter Poppy e-mails from Thailand that’s she’s married hippie boyfriend Richard, and Nathan also wants their house for him and Minty. A bitter blow, because Rose has loved fixing it up and making a beautiful garden. At first she weeps, wonders where she went wrong, can’t eat, drinks too much. But then she begins to fight back. She visits a college friend in Paris who makes her buy some sexy clothes, is given some interesting jobs, is befriended by a Cabinet Minister who’s been hurt by a scandal caused by his mentally ill wife, and meets up again with her first love, American Rhodes scholar Hal Thorne, now a famous travel writer. As she recalls how she met and parted from Hal, she learns that Nathan is finding life with Minty more complicated than he’d expected and that he misses his family. With her children making interesting changes in their lives, Rose is ready for a few herself. A wry and elegant tale about a woman of a certain age fighting back and winning unexpected victories.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Do you think the young Rose should have stayed with Hal or did she make the right decision to marry Nathan?

2. How would you describe Minty's relationship with Rose? Were there definite indicators something was amiss that Rose might have noticed sooner?

3. Do you think that Rose was complacent in her marriage and career? What have you learned from her journey toward self-exploration?

4. What do you think of Minty? Did she really want Rose's life all along and just pretended to be independent or do you think something changed her?

5. Rose sought friendship and solace with friends to help her through the depression. Are there other ways she might have helped herself? What would you have done?

6. The novel was written from a wife's point of view. At any time in the novel, did you find yourself sympathizing more with Nathan than with Rose?

7. Which character, if any, in the novel disappointed you most and why? Which character surprised you most and why?

8. How do you think Rose's life choices have influenced her daughter Poppy's life? Do you think Poppy's marriage will last?

9. The novel ends on an ambiguous note. What do you think happens next?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns
Lauren Weisberger, 2013
Simon & Schuster
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439136645

Summary
The sequel you’ve been waiting for: the follow-up to the sensational #1 bestseller The Devil Wears Prada.

Almost a decade has passed since Andy Sachs quit the job “a million girls would die for” working for Miranda Priestly at Runway magazine—a dream that turned out to be a nightmare. Andy and Emily, her former nemesis and co-assistant, have since joined forces to start a highend bridal magazine.

The Plunge has quickly become required reading for the young and stylish. Now they get to call all the shots: Andy writes and travels to her heart’s content; Emily plans parties and secures advertising like a seasoned pro.

Even better, Andy has met the love of her life. Max Harrison, scion of a storied media family, is confident, successful, and drop-dead gorgeous. Their wedding will be splashed across all the society pages as their friends and family gather to toast the glowing couple. Andy Sachs is on top of the world.

But karma’s a bitch. The morning of her wedding, Andy can’t shake the past. And when she discovers a secret letter with crushing implications, her wedding-day jitters turn to cold dread. Andy realizes that nothing—not her husband, nor her beloved career—is as it seems. She never suspected that her efforts to build a bright new life would lead her back to the darkness she barely escaped ten years ago—and directly into the path of the devil herself. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1977
• Raised—Scranton and Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Currently—lives in New York City

Lauren Weisberger is the American author of six novels. She is best known for her 2003 bestseller The Devil Wears Prada, a speculated roman a clef of her real life experience as a put-upon assistant to Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

Early life and education
Weisberger was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a school teacher mother and a department-store-president turned mortgage-broker father. Weisberger was raised in Conservative Judaism and later Reform Judaism. She spent her early youth in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Scranton. At 11, her parents divorced and she and her younger sister, Dana, moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the Lehigh Valley region of the state, with their mother.

At Parkland High School, in South Whitehall Township near Allentown, Weisberger was involved in intramural sports, some competitive sports, extra projects, and organizations. She graduated in 1995. She attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she was an English major, graduating in 1999.

After college, she traveled as a backpacker through Europe, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Hong Kong. Returning home, she moved to Manhattan and was hired as Wintour's assistant at Vogue. She was there for ten months before leaving along with features editor Richard Story. While Weisberger said she felt out of place at the magazine, managing editor Laurie Jones later said, "She seemed to be a perfectly happy, lovely woman".

Weisberger and Story began working for Departures Magazine, an American Express publication, where she wrote 100-word reviews and became an assistant editor. She also published a 2004 article in Playboy magazine.

After mentioning her interest in writing classes to her boss, Richard Story, he referred her to his friend Charles Salzberg. She started writing a story about her time at Vogue, and completed it by trying to write 15 pages every couple of weeks. After repeated urgings, she showed the finished work to agents; it sold within two weeks.

Novels
In 2003, Weisberger's first book, The Devil Wears Prada, was released and spent six months on the New York Times Best Seller List. The book is a semi-fictional but highly critical view of the Manhattan elite. As of July 2006, The Devil Wears Prada was the best-selling mass-market softcover book in the nation, according to Publishers Weekly. The book is largely based on Weisberger's experience at Vogue. There is much speculation that the character of Miranda Priestly represents aspects of Anna Wintour. The fictional Elias-Clark publishing company is said to be modeled after Condé Nast.

The book calls into light the many aspects of one's first job. It also highlights the presumed insanity of the fashion world and the difficulty and pressure a person goes through when trying to balance a demanding job with an adequate social life. The book provides a comical insight into the fashion world. While this book was met with stunning success, one former employee of Anna Wintour, Kate Betts, criticized Weisberger and the book in The New York Times, saying that Weisberger and Wintour are the direct counterparts of their fictional characters and that "Andrea ... is just as much a snob as the snobs she is thrown in with." In 2013 Weisberger published a sequel of the book: Revenge Wears Prada: The Devil Returns.

Weisberger's second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, was published in fall of 2005 and is based upon the trials and tribulations of the New York City public relations world. It received generally unfavorable reviews. Despite debuting on the New York Times Best Sellers List at No. 10, it dropped off the list in two weeks and was noted for its disappointing sales.

Chasing Harry Winston is Weisberger's third novel, released in 2008. The main characters are three best friend New Yorkers facing the horror of turning 30. The book was panned by critics and was voted "#1 Worst Book of 2008" by Entertainment Weekly.

Last Night at Chateau Marmont was released in 2010 and debuted at No. 9 on the New York Times Bestseller List on September 5, 2010

Revenge Wears Prada, a sequel to The Devil Wears Prada, was released in 2013. It debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times Bestseller List. Weisbeger's sixth book came out in 2016: The Singles Game, a look at the highstakes world of professional tennis.

Short Stories
Her short story "The Bamboo Confessions" is included in the anthology American Girls About Town. It is about a New York City backpacker who travels around the world and begins to view her love life back home in a different light. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/11/2013.)

Book Reviews
A juicy drama.
US Weekly

The devil is back and better than ever.
SheKnows.com

Seems like a must-have beach read for us!

OKmagazine.com

The reader is pulled into the glitz and glamour reminiscent of the New York Times bestseller The Devil Wears Prada and the movie on which it was based.
BookReporter.com

Weisberger revisits her heroine Andy Sachs—former assistant to the vicious Miranda Priestly of Runway magazine. Now the editor of her own wildly successful bridal magazine...a series of events catapult Andy back to her self-conscious Runway days.... [W]hile the resolutions won't shock...this sequel is a fun summer read.
Publishers Weekly

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The Revisioners
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, 2019
Counterpoint Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781640092587

Summary
In 1924, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery.

Now her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine’s family.

Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine’s descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother, Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays Ava to be her companion.

But Martha’s behavior soon becomes erratic, then threatening, and Ava must escape before her story and Josephine’s converge.

The Revisioners explores the depths of women’s relationships—powerful women and marginalized women, healers and survivors. It is a novel about the bonds between mothers and their children, the dangers that upend those bonds.

At its core, The Revisioners ponders generational legacies, the endurance of hope, and the undying promise of freedom. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1982 (?)
• Where—New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth; J.D., University of California-Berkeley
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley.

Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom (2017), was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook's Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A] stunning new novel…. Song lyrics, prayers, chants and Scripture are used liberally to situate the characters in time, but also to bind them to one another through a shared culture.… Today’s readers will find the novel’s most visceral moments of cruelty all too familiar: white Americans dismantling any pretense of civility, taking out their own great pain on a black body. But the… novel is about the women, the mothers.… The Revisioners also reminds us that… there are also connections… that turn a collection of individuals into a community, and will forever be more significant than any bond that’s merely skin deep.
Stephanie Powell Watts - New York Times Book Review

[Sexton's] subtle portrayal of a black mother’s competing desires is layered with both pathos and wit…. We hear from her as an enslaved child in 1855 and as a successful businesswoman in 1924.… Each of these episodes is shattered by violence, yes, but also leavened by varying degrees of progress, despite the persistence of white people convinced of their superiority, innocence and benevolence. The result is a novel marked by acts of cruelty but not, ultimately, overwhelmed by them.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Few capture the literary world’s attention with their debut like this author did; her first novel, A Kind of Freedom, was nominated for the National Book Award and earned several other top accolades. Her anticipated follow-up offers a bracing window into Southern life and tensions, alternating between two women’s stories—set nearly 100 years apart.
Entertainment Weekly

[A] sweeping novel…. Sexton’s characters gain strength by finding one another across the generations.
New Yorker

The fragility fashioned by the sacrifices of Black bodies is confronted in this smart and spooky novel.
Essence

A powerful tale of racial tensions across generations.
People

Wilkerson crafts a necessary narrative on motherhood, race and freedom. (A Must Read Book of the Year)
Time

In this incantatory novel by the author of A Kind of Freedom, a biracial New Orleans woman grapples with prejudice by excavating the story of a female ancestor who endured the roil between slavery and the Jazz Age.
Oprah Magazine,

(Starred review) [An] excellent story of a New Orleans family’s ascent from slavery to freedom…. A chilling plot twist reveals the insidious racial divide that stretches through the generations, but it’s the larger message that’s so timely… powerful and full of hope.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review) [W]ell-crafted…. The dynamics of a brutal past… is core here, but the narrative… [acknowledges] that the past is not completely past…. Two fearless women separated by time but both dealing with white women’s racism.
Library Journal

It's rare for dual narratives to be equally compelling, and Sexton achieves this while illustrating the impact of slavery long after its formal end.… Readers will engage fully in this compelling story of African American women who have power in a culture that attempts to dismantle it.
Booklist

(Starred review) This second novel from Sexton confirms the storytelling gifts she displayed in her lushly readable debut, A Kind of Freedom…. At the intriguing crossroads of the seen and the unseen lies a weave among five generations of women
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for THE REVISIONERS … then take off on your own:

1. The Revisioners is structured as different narratives, each featuring a woman trying to free herself from some kind of crisis. What are the nature of these crises, and what, if anything, do they have in common?

2. Mothers are prominent in all three narratives. What role do they play in each section? Taken all together, what central role do they play that ties all three sections together?

3. In the third narrative, the earliest in time, we are introduced to secret meetings held by slaves who call themselves the Revisioners. What does it mean to "revision," and how does revisioning become a connecting link throughout the novel (thus the title)?

4. Why is spiritual knowledge and practice so vitally important to the mothers throughout the novel?

5. Talk about Ava's experience as the only African American in her school. How does she use the imaginary "white light" to encase herself? Where does she think the white light might come from?

6. The novel recounts acts of racism: in what way does the present echo the past? To what degree has racism abated today? Or has it? Has it merely changed its appearance and modus operandi?

7. Does The Revisioners leave any hope for us today or, more important, for future generations?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Revolution of Marina M.
Janet Fitch, 2017
Little, Brown
816 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316022064

Summary
From the mega-bestselling author of White Oleander, a sweeping historical saga of the Russian Revolution, as seen through the eyes of one young woman.

St. Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1916.
Marina Makarova is a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history.

Swept up on these tides, Marina will join the marches for workers' rights, fall in love with a radical young poet, and betray everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn.

As her country goes through almost unimaginable upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion and devastating loss, and the private heroism of an ordinary woman living through extraordinary times.

This is the epic, mesmerizing story of one indomitable woman's journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—November 9, 1956
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Reed College
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles

Janet Fitch is an American author most famously known her 1999 novel White Oleander, which was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club pick the year it came out. The novel was adapted to film in 2002. Other novels followed: Paint it Black in 2006 and The Revolution of Marina M. in 2017.

Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. She is a graduate of Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon. As an undergraduate, she had decided to become a historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes.

But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night on her twenty-first birthday with the revelation she wanted to write fiction.

Currently, Fitch is a faculty member in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction.

Two of her favorite authors are Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/14/2017.)

Book Reviews
[A] vast, ambitious historical tale.… Marina, the reader [eventually] concludes, is not a true revolutionary; she is tossed like flotsam by great events; the the novel would benefit if she were more a participant.… [S]omewhere in the middle of its 800 pages, this novel loses any semblance of [the author's] 19th century forbear's sense of narrative control. That said, the feral descriptions of sex provide some of the novel's most amusing, if decidedly unDostoyevskian, moments.
Simon Sebag Montefiore - New York Times Book Review

[A] question that haunts the story…what is this book about?… Many books, especially those requiring 800 pages of time from their readers, would be undone by the absence of a clear purpose. And yet, astonishingly, The Revolution of Marina M. is hard to put down. Like Marina, it is maddening and flawed. It makes a good many bad decisions. And yet it is charming and lively and, ultimately, worth the time.
Trine Tsouderos - Chicago Tribune

Marina M is a budding 16-year-old poet on the eve of the 1917 October revolution, when the Bolsheviks take power. Fitch creates a virtual magic lantern show of the following three years of turmoil, immersing Marina in each scene. She begins a love affair with Kolya, a mercurial officer secretly involved in the lucrative black market. She moves in with Genya, a poet in a futurist commune. She plays dangerous games with her childhood friend Varvara, who becomes a Cheka commissar. Her father is involved with a counter-revolutionary plot; her mother inspires a spiritualist cult that withdraws into the countryside to escape the Red Terror and cholera epidemic. Marina is by turns adventurous, foolish, romantic, self-destructive and courageous in this extraordinary coming-of-age tale.
Jane Ciabbatari - BBC Culture

[A]n epic bildungsroman.… The resilient Marina has much in common with the modern heroines of the author’s previous books and is a protagonist worth following. However, even though the book is well researched, the overlong narrative peters out.
Publishers Weekly

Fitch captures the epic grandeur of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy…. Yet she also infuses her protagonists with transgressive sexual energy…. Verdict: Readers…will thrill to this narrative of women in love during the cataclysm of war. —Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA
Library Journal

Fitch's novel…provides an excellent sense of history's unpredictability and shows how the desperate pursuit of survival leads to morally compromising decisions.… [C]inematic storytelling and Marina's vibrant personality are standout elements in this dramatic novel. —Sarah Johnson
Booklist

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Revolution of Marina M. … then take off on your own:

1. Describe Marina. Early on in the novel, she leads a life of privilege, yet she is dissatisfied. Why? What does she want? (Okay, sex...but what else?) Do you admire her? In what ways does Marina change over the course of the novel?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: Near the beginning of the novel, Marina says,

I was in love with the Future, in love with the idea of Fate. There's nothing more romantic to the young — until its dogs sink their teeth into your calf and pull you to the ground.

Do you think she is correct: that the idea of future or fate (which one is she actually referring to … or is it both?) is exciting to the young? As you read through the novel, at what point did fate stop being romantic for Marina? When did the the dogs start to "sink their teeth into [her] calf"? By the end of the novel, has Marina changed? In her outlook? Or in her essential character traits? What, if anything, has she learned?

3. What is the political state of Russia early on in the book? Marina describes history as "the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall." She is obviously referring to the government of the Czar. In what way is the regime "rotten" and "ready to fall"?

4. Why are the reforms offered up by Premier Prince Lvov — the promise of freedom of speech and assembly, the right to strike, and elections by ballot — insufficient for the radicals? What causes the provisional government to fail?

5. Talk about the effect that Leon Trotsky has as he addresses the crowd at the Cirque Moderne. Is he a typical demagogue out for power and self-aggrandizement? Or does he offer genuine path of reform for the Russian people?

6. What do you think of Marina's best friend Varvara and their relationship? In the fervor of revolution, was Varvara right or wrong in persuading Marina to spy on her father? And what about her father's outing of his daughter?

7. Describe the conditions of life for the population in the months following the October 17 overthrow? How grim is it?

8. Baron Arkady von Princip. Care to talk about him? What was your experience reading about the S&M he subjects Marina to?

9. Returning to the quotation in Question 2 — about how youthful romanticism can turn into a vicious animal — what do you see as the thematic concern of The Revolution of Marina M.? Is it how young people come of age in the midst of life's trials? Is it what happens to bonds of love and loyalty during social and political upheaval? Is a cautionary tale about how revolutions can turn more repressive than the regimes they replace? Or perhaps it's simply offered as a bird's eye view into one of the great events of the 20th century, one that shaped Western politics for decades to come. Or is it something else?

10. What have you learned about the October 17 Revolution that you did not know before reading Janet Fitch's novel? What surprised you most? What did you find most disturbing, maybe horrifying? Where did you find your sympathies falling: with the victors or the vanquished?

11. The novel is 800 pages long. Too long for you? Do you feel the author made some unnecessary detours in order to ramp up the plot line? Or do Marina's many adventures — as a sex slave, as part of a spiritual cult, living with the astronomers — enhance the story for you, giving it life and color?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)

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Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates, 1961, 1989
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375708442

Summary
From the moment of its publication in 1961, Revolutionary Road was hailed as a masterpiece of realistic fiction and as the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs.

It's the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple who have lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.
(From the publisher.)

The book was adapted into a 2008 film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.

Author Bio
• Birth—February 3, 1926
• Where—Yonkers, New York, USA
• Death—November 7, 1992
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama
• Education—World War II

A native New Yorker, Richard Yates was born in 1926; his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the National Book Award (in the same year as Catch-22). Much admired by peers, he was known during his lifetime as the foremost fiction writer of the post-war "age of anxiety." He published his last novel in 1986, and died in 1992. (From the publisher.)

More
Richard Yates, an American novelist and short story writer, was a chronicler of mid-20th century mainstream American life, often cited as artistically residing somewhere between J.D. Salinger and John Cheever. He is regarded as the foremost novelist of the post-WWII Age of Anxiety.

Born in Yonkers, New York, Yates came from an unstable home. His parents divorced when he was three and much of his childhood was spent in many different towns and residences. Yates first became interested in journalism and writing while attending Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut. After leaving Avon, Yates joined the Army, serving in France and Germany during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Upon his return to New York he worked as a journalist, freelance ghost writer (briefly writing speeches for Senator Robert Kennedy) and publicity writer for Remington Rand Corporation.

His career as a novelist began in 1961 with the publication of the widely heralded Revolutionary Road. He subsequently taught writing at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, Boston University (where his papers are archived), at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, at Wichita State University, and at the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing Program.

In 1962, he wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of William Styron's Lie Down In Darkness. Yates was also an acclaimed author of short stories. Despite this, only one of his short stories appeared in the The New Yorker (after repeated rejections). This story, "The Canal," was published in the magazine nine years after the author's death to celebrate the 2001 release of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.

For much of his life, Yates's work met almost universal critical acclaim, yet not one of his books sold over 12,000 copies in hardcover first edition. All of his novels were out of print in the years after his death, although he was championed by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Parker, William Styron, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever. Yates's brand of realism was a direct influence on writers such as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.

Twice divorced, Yates was the father of three daughters: Sharon, Monica and Gina. In 1992, he died of emphysema and complications from minor surgery in Birmingham, Alabama.

His reputation has substantially increased posthumously and many of his novels have since been reissued in new editions. This current success can be largely traced to the influence of Stewart O'Nan's 1999 essay in the Boston Review "The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety Disappeared from Print." With the revival of interest in Yates' life and work after his death, Blake Bailey published the first in-depth biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003). (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
More than two decades after its original publication, it remains a remarkable and deeply troubling book—a book that creates an indelible portrait of lost promises and mortgaged hopes in the suburbs of America.... Writing in controlled, economical prose, Mr. Yates delineates the shape of these disintegrating lives without lapsing into sentimentality or melodrama. His ear for dialogue enables him to infuse the banal chitchat of suburbia with a subtext of Pinteresque proportions, and he proves equally skilled at reproducing the pretentious, status-conscious talk of people brought up on Freud and Marx. If, at times, we are tempted to see Frank as something of a deluded, ineffectual snob, we are also inclined to sympathize with him—so graceful is Mr. Yates's use of irony. His portrait of these thwarted, needlessly doomed lives is at once brutal and compassionate.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times (4/25/83)

(Refers to Yates's Collected Stories, 2001) At his best, Yates was a poet of post-World War II loneliness and disappointment, creating in his finest stories and in his masterpiece, Revolutionary Road, indelible, Edward Hopperesque portraits of dreamers who have mortgaged their dreams. Trapped in ill-considered marriages and dead-end jobs, they find themselves living on the margins of the postwar boom, the gap between their modest expectations and the even more modest realities of their day-to-day lives leading to rage, humiliation and alcoholic despair.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times (4/17/01)

A powerful treatment of a characteristically American theme.... A moving and absorbing story.
Atlantic Monthly

So much nonsense has been written on suburban life and mores that it comes as a considerable shock to read a book by someone who seems to have his own ideas on the subject and who pursues them relentlessly to the bitter end..... It is reminiscent of the popular [1999] film American Beauty in its depiction of white-collar life as fraught with discontent. Others have picked up on this theme since, but Yates remains a solid read.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of the novel's title, "Revolutionary Road"? In what ways might it be read as an ironic commentary on mid-twentieth century American values?

2. Why does Yates begin the novel with the story of the play? In what ways does it set up some of the themes—disillusionment, self-deception, play-acting, etc.—that are developed throughout the novel?

3. Frank rails about the middle-class complacency of his neighbors in the Revolutionary Hill Estates. “It's as if everybody'd made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let's have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let's all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality...and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we'll all get busy and pretend it never happened” [pp. 68-69]. Is Frank's critique of suburbia accurate? In what ways does Frank himself live in a state of self-deception? Why can he see so clearly the self-deception of others but not his own?

4. What ironies are involved in Frank going to work for the same firm his father worked for? What is Frank's attitude toward his job and the fact that he's walking in his father's footsteps?

5. Describing a Negro couple holding hands at the mental hospital where John Givings has been confined, the narrator writes that “it wasn't easy to identify the man as a patient until you noticed that his other hand was holding the chromium leg of the table in a yellow-knuckled grip of desperation, as if it were the rail of a heaving ship” [p. 296]. What do such precise and vivid physical descriptions—often highly metaphorical—add to the texture of the novel? Where else does Yates use such descriptions to reveal a character's emotional state?

6. Revolutionary Road frequently—and seamlessly—moves between past and present, as characters drift in and out of reveries. (April's childhood memory [pp. 321-326] is a good example). What narrative purpose do these reveries serve? How do they deepen the reader's understanding of the inner lives of the main characters?

7. What roles do Frank's affair with Maureen and April's sexual encounter with Shep play in the outcome of the novel? Are they equivalent? What different motivations draw Frank and April to commit adultery?

8. Twice Frank talks April out of an abortion, and both times he later regrets having done so, admitting that he didn't want the children any more than she did. What motivates him to argue so passionately against April aborting her pregnancies? What methods does he use to persuade her? Is John Givings right in suggesting that it's the only way he can prove his manhood?

9. What role does John Givings play in the novel? Why is he such an important character, even though he appears in only two scenes? How does he move the action along?

10. How do Frank and April feel about Shep and Milly Campbell? What do they reveal about themselves in their attitudes toward their closest friends?

11. Before she gives herself a miscarriage, April leaves a note telling Frank not to blame himself if anything should happen to her. But is he to blame for April's death? Why, and to what extent, might he be responsible?

12. The narrator writes, after April's death, that “The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy” [p. 339]. In what ways is the novel tragic? What tragic flaws might be ascribed to both Frank and April? Why are the Revolutionary Hill Estates ill-suited to tragedy?

13. What is Yates suggesting by the fact that the only character in the novel who sees and speaks the truth has been confined to an insane asylum? Does John Givings's‚ outsider status give him the freedom to speak the truth, or has his natural tendency toward telling the truth, however unpleasant it might be, landed him in a mental hospital?

14. Near the end of the novel, the narrator says of Nancy Brace, as she listens to Milly's retelling of April's death: “She liked her stories neat, with points, and she clearly felt there were too many loose ends in this one” [p. 345]. What is the problem with wanting stories to be “neat”? In what ways does Revolutionary Road circumvent this kind of overly tidy or moralistic reading? Does the novel itself present too many “loose ends”?

15. The novel ends with Mrs. Givings chattering on to her husband about how “irresponsible” and “unwholesome” the Wheelers were. What is the significance, for the novel as a whole, of the final sentences: “But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid”? [p. 355]. What symbolic value might be assigned to the plant that Mrs. Givings mentions at the end of the novel?

16. Revolutionary Road was first published in 1961. In what ways does it reflect the social and psychological realities of that period? In what ways does it anticipate and illuminate our own time?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Rice Mother
Rani Manicka, 2002
Penguin Group USA
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142004548

Summary
Winner, 2003 Commonwealth Prize for Southeast Asia & South Pacific

At the age of fourteen, Lakshmi leaves behind her childhood among the mango trees of Ceylon for married life across the ocean in Malaysia, and soon finds herself struggling to raise a family in a country that is, by turns, unyielding and amazing, brutal and beautiful.

Giving birth to a child every year until she is nineteen, Lakshmi becomes a formidable matriarch, determined to secure a better life for her daughters and sons. From the Japanese occupation during World War II to the torture of watching some of her children succumb to life's most terrible temptations, she rises to face every new challenge with almost mythic strength.

Dreamy and lyrical, told in the alternating voices of the men and women of this amazing family, The Rice Mother gorgeously evokes a world where small pleasures offset unimaginable horrors, where ghosts and gods walk hand in hand. It marks the triumphant debut of a writer whose wisdom and soaring prose will touch readers, especially women, the world over (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Malaysia
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Commonwealth Award for South East Aisa and
Pacific Region
• Currently—London, UK; Malaysia

Rani Manicka is a novelist, born and educated in Malaysia and living in England. Infused with her own Sri Lankan Tamil family history, The Rice Mother is her first novel. It recently won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2003 for South East Asia and South Pacific region. It has been translated into 17 languages. Her second novel, Touching Earth, was published in 2005. Rani is also an economic graduate. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Manicka's luminous first novel is a multigenerational story about a Sri Lankan family in Malaysia. In the 1920s, Lakshmi is a bright-eyed, carefree child in Ceylon. But at 14, her mother marries her to Ayah, a 37-year-old rich widower living in Malaysia. When she arrives at her new home, she promptly discovers that Ayah is not rich at all, but a clerk who had borrowed a gold watch and a servant to trick Lakshmi's mother. Ayah is for the most part a decent man, however, and Lakshmi rallies and takes control of a sprawling household that soon includes six children of her own. There is a period of contented family life before WWII and the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, during which Lakshmi's eldest and most beautiful daughter, Mohini, is abducted and killed by Japanese soldiers. The family unravels as Ayah withdraws and Lakshmi falls prey to fits of rage. Mohini's twin brother, Lakshmnan, becomes a compulsive gambler, leaving his own wife and three children impoverished. The story is told through the shifting perspectives of different family members, including son Sevenese, who can see the dead; youngest daughter, Lalita, neither pretty nor gifted; Rani, Lakshmnan's fierce and beleaguered wife; and Lakshmnan's daughter, Dimple. Their voices are convincingly distinct, and the prismatic sketches form a cohesive and vibrant saga. Manicka can be a bit syrupy on the subjects of childhood and maternal love, but she also has a fine feeling for domestic strife and the ways in which grief permeates a household.
Publishers Weekly

When 14-year-old Lakshmi marries a widower of 37, she believes that she is leaving her Sri Lankan village for a life of luxury in Malaysia. Instead, she endures hardship and poverty, giving birth to six children in the years before the Japanese invasion of World War II. In this gripping multigenerational saga, the tumultuous history of Malaysia becomes the backdrop for Lakshmi's indomitable spirit. The barbarity of the Japanese, postwar prosperity, the bursting of the Southeast Asian financial bubble, the vice trades of opium, gambling, and sex-all take their toll on Lakshmi's children and grandchildren. However, while her husband and ultimately all of her children prove to be disappointments, Lakshmi continues to love them and do what's best for all of them, even if it seems cruel. First novelist Manicka's sympathetic portrait of this larger-than-life matriarch is based on her own grandmother. Her page-turner, narrated in turn by Lakshmi and various family members, is not only a portrait of one family but also a tantalizing glimpse of an unfamiliar world. Strongly recommended for most public libraries. —Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Library Journal

Graceful, engrossing, and peopled with memorable characters, this novel is sure to attract a wide audience. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist

Loosely autobiographical, multigenerational first novel: exotic, sensual, sometimes sentimental, often searing, and ultimately universal in its depiction of an Indian family in Malaysia. It's 1931, and 14-year-old Lakshmi leaves Ceylon in an arranged marriage to the much older Ayah. When Ayah turns out to be not the rich businessman Lakshmi expected but a lowly clerk whose sweet, simple nature keeps him from professional advancement, bright and ambitious Lakshmi quickly takes charge of their financial and domestic affairs. By the time she's twenty she has six children whom she feeds, clothes, and educates with iron-willed devotion. There are the twins, brilliant oldest son Lakshmnan and his twin sister Mohini, with her otherworldly beauty; pretty Anna; the adventurous outsider Sevenese; Jeyan, who is perhaps not as simple-minded as everyone assumes; and the homely, shy Lalita. The children all remember their early years as close to idyllic. Then WWII breaks out. When Mohini is raped and killed by the Japanese (whom Manicka, with a loss of perspective, portrays as unrelentingly monsterlike), the family begins to fall apart. Lakshmi has fits of rage that approach madness, while Lakshmnan's early promise fizzles into dissolute gambling and an unhappy marriage (his wife is an almost cartoonish villain among otherwise highly nuanced characters). Except for the happily married Anna, life does not work out as Lakshmi planned for her children. Yet they all revere her, even Lakshmnan; and Ayah's gentle love provides an emotional ballast that Lakshmi does not understand until too late. Lakshmnan's daughter Dimple, whose beauty recalls Mohini, tape-records her aunts' and uncles' (as well as her parents' and grandparents') memories—and shifting perspectives—to preserve the family legacy for her own daughter. Toward the end Manicka falters, forcing the story of Dimple's unhappy marriage into plot manipulations that feel forced, but, still, the story's richness and careful accumulation of detail are reminiscent of a very different family chronicle, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Read this one slowly, to savor.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What was your favorite part of the birds'-nest story that introduced the novel? How did it echo throughout the novel? Give some examples.

2. Did you feel that the author's use of the first person was an effective way to tell this story? Why or why not?

3. Lakshmi says this of Mui Tsai: "I had found a friend, but it was the beginning of a lost friendship. If I had known then what I know now, I would have treasured her more. She was the only true friend I ever made." Discuss this passage and its implications. Do you think Lakshmi could have been a better friend to Mui Tsai? Why and how? Were there any authentic friendships between women in the novel?

4. Consider the scene in which Sevenese explains "Rice Mother" to Dimple, and tells her that Lakshmi is their family's Rice Mother. Give examples of how Lakshmi is a Rice Mother. Were there any other Rice Mothers in the novel? What about in your own life?

5. Rani Manicka filled her novel with symbolism and motifs. Name a few images that continually emerged—such as spiders, bamboo, and the colors black and red—and discuss what they might have meant. Did they represent different things to the various members of your reading group? What does this richness of symbols say about the novel?

6. hysically, Dimple is described as being almost a mirror image of Mohini. How do you think this altered the course of her life? What do you think drew her to Sevenese, and, for that matter, to Luke?

7. Which characters resonated most powerfully for you? Were there other characters that you would have liked to know more about? Why?

8. "It is true that your mind can float out and hover over you when it can no longer endure what is happening to your body." Dimple says this as Luke rapes her. How does this one line illuminate one of the novel's themes? What do you think the author is saying about grief, and coping with tragedy? In what ways do the characters escape their grief? Do any face it head-on?

9. What do you see in the future for Nisha? Do you think she will become a Rice Mother? Why? Has the author left any clues for the reader?

10. How resilient is the human spirit? Does time heal all wounds? Do we do the best with the skills we've been given? In your opinion, could the lives of the characters in The Rice Mother have been any different? Or, even if Mohini had lived, would they have fallen prey to the same vices that consumed them in the end?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Rich and Pretty
Rumaan Aman, 2016
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062429933

Summary
As close as sisters for twenty years, Sarah and Lauren have been together through high school and college, first jobs and first loves, the uncertainties of their twenties and the realities of their thirties.

Sarah, the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite, works at a charity and is methodically planning her wedding. Lauren—beautiful, independent, and unpredictable—is single and working in publishing, deflecting her parents’ worries and questions about her life and future by trying not to think about it herself.

Each woman envies—and is horrified by—particular aspects of the other’s life, topics of conversation they avoid with masterful linguistic pirouettes.

Once, Sarah and Lauren were inseparable; for a long a time now, they’ve been apart. Can two women who rarely see one other, selectively share secrets, and lead different lives still call themselves best friends? Is it their abiding connection—or just force of habit—that keeps them together?

With impeccable style, biting humor, and a keen sense of detail, Rumaan Alam deftly explores how the attachments we form in childhood shift as we adapt to our adult lives—and how the bonds of friendship endure, even when our paths diverge. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Rmaan Alam’s writing has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Rumpus, Washington Square Review, Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

He started his career in fashion publishing at Lucky magazine, has written extensively on interior design for Domino, Lonny, Elle Decor, architecturaldigest.com, and elsewhere, and has worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director. He studied at Oberlin College, and lives in New York. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Rumaan Alam creates characters who are grappling with their adult identities while securing their childhood bond.
Wall Street Journal

[A] smart, enticing novel.
Miami Herald

Rumaan Alam transforms a whimsical beach read into compelling literary prose…Rich and Pretty is a realistic look at female friendship.
Associated Press

Written with humor and an impeccable ear for girlfriendly conversation--by a man, no less!--Rich and Pretty is a sparkling debut.
People

Rumaan Alam beautifully frames the nuances of female friendship: that complex alchemy of expectations and envy, and how they chafe with a lingering deep affection for each other.
Elle

[A] sweet yet cutting exploration of the bonds of friendship.... With astute descriptions of how values, tastes, desires, and ambitions change over two decades, Alam’s tale of a divergent friendship smartly reflects the trial and error nature of finding a mate and deciding how to grow up.
Publishers Weekly

Sarah and Lauren, best friends since age 11...[find] their lives are diverging.... Perfectly capturing a changing yet resilient friendship, this debut novel full of warmth and humor will appeal to anyone who has experienced a similar bond. —Catherine Coyne, Mansfield P.L., MA
Library Journal

Although Alam seems to have no deep new insight to share and his story is thin on plot, his characters are real and rounded enough to escape being entirely cliche.... [He] captures something truthful and essential about the push-pull of friendship.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available; in the meantime use these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Rich and Pretty...then take off on your own:

1. Describe the two young woman: what are their personalities, desires, and motivation in life? How do their backgrounds shape their decisions? Do you admire one character more than the other?

2. Talk about the pressures the friendship faces as the two mature. What do you see as the fault lines in their relationship?

3. (Follow-up to Question #2) Sarah thinks to herself:

Things change, in life—of course they do. People grow up, become interested in new things, new people. Our way of being in the world is probably a lot less fixed than most people think. But Lauren is a part of her world, and she's a part of Lauren's.

On the other hand, Lauren wonders if her friendship with Sarah has survived because of habit. What is your assessment?

4. Do you see yourself in either of the characters? Have you ever had a similar relationship in your own life—a long friendship that has felt the strains of different backgrounds or different life choices?

6. What role does socio-economic status play in this book?

7. Talk about the title of the book, "Rich and Pretty." What is its thematic significance? (Notice, too, the blurred cover image.) Lauren's prettiness is never described while Sarah's unattractive features are spelled out. Why do you think that is?

8. As the story ends, what do you think the future holds for the two women? Will their friendship survive?

9. The author is male. How well do you think he captures the female voice? In an interview, Nina Wertheimer of NPR said, "you have a nearly flawless ear for the way women talk. And you are a guy." Do you agree...or not.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Rich People Problems (Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy 3)
Kevin Kwan, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525432371

Summary
Kevin Kwan, bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians and China Rich Girlfriend, is back with an uproarious new novel of a family riven by fortune, an ex-wife driven psychotic with jealousy, a battle royal fought through couture gown sabotage, and the heir to one of Asia's greatest fortunes locked out of his inheritance.

When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside—but he's not alone. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch’s massive fortune.

With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park—a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore—Nicholas’s childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage. As her relatives fight over heirlooms, Astrid Leong is at the center of her own storm, desperately in love with her old sweetheart Charlie Wu, but tormented by her ex-husband—a man hell bent on destroying Astrid’s reputation and relationship.

Meanwhile Kitty Pong, married to China’s second richest man, billionaire Jack Bing, still feels second best next to her new step-daughter, famous fashionista Colette Bing.

A sweeping novel that takes us from the elegantly appointed mansions of Manila to the secluded private islands in the Sulu Sea, from a kidnapping at Hong Kong’s most elite private school to a surprise marriage proposal at an Indian palace, caught on camera by the telephoto lenses of paparazzi, Kevin Kwan's hilarious, gloriously wicked new novel reveals the long-buried secrets of Asia's most privileged families and their rich people problems. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1973-74
• Where—Singapore
• Raised—Clear Lake, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Houston-Clear Lake; B.F.A., Parsons School of Design
• Currently—lives in New York, New York

Kevin Kwan is a Singaporean-American novelist best known for his satirical Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy (2013-17). He was born in Singapore, the youngest of three boys, into an established, old-wealth Chinese family.

Background and early years
His great-grandfather, Oh Sian Guan, was a founding director of Singapore's oldest bank, the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Arthur Kwan Pah Chien, was an ophthalmologist who became Singapore's first Western-trained specialist and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his philanthropic efforts. His maternal grandfather, Rev. Paul Hang Sing Hon, founded the Hinghwa Methodist Church. Kwan is also related to Hong Kong-born American actress Nancy Kwan.

As a young boy, Kwan lived in Singapore with his paternal grandparents and attended the Anglo-Chinese School. When he was 11, his father, an engineer, and mother, a pianist, moved the family to the U.S., eventually landing in Clear Lake, Texas, where Kwan graduated from high school at the age of 16. Kwan earned a B.A. in Media Studies from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, after which he moved to Manhattan to attend Parsons School of Design to pursue a B.F.A. in Photography.

Career
Staying in New York, Kwan worked for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, and Tibor Kalman's design firm M & Co. In 2000, Kwan established his own creative studio; his clients have included Ted.com, Museum of Modern Art, and the New York Times.

In 2007, Kwan edited I Was Cuba, a photographic "memoir" of Cuba; in 2008 he co-authored with Deborah Aaronson an advice book, Luck: The Essential Guide.

Then, in 2009, while caring for his dying father, Kwan began to conceive of Crazy Rich Asians. He and his father reminisced about their life in Singapore while driving to and from medical appointments. Hoping to capture those memories, Kwan began writing them down in story form.

Living in the U.S. since 1985, Kwan's view of Asia had become westernized—he has said he feels like "an outsider looking in." His goal was to change the stereotypical perception of wealthy Asians' conspicuous consumption, refocusing instead on old-wealth families more like his own, families that exude "style and taste [and] have been quietly going about their lives for generations."

Four years later, in 2013, Kwan published Crazy Rich Asians, the first volume of what would become his trilogy. Two years later, in 2015, he released China Rich Girlfriend and, in 2017, Rich People's Problems. In 2018 the first book of the trilogy was released as a film and became an immediate box office hit.

In August 2018, Amazon Studios ordered a new drama series from Kwan and STX Entertainment. The as yet unnamed series is to be set in Hong Kong and will follow the "most influential and powerful family" along with their business empire.

Recognition
In 2014, Kwan was named as one of the "Five Writers to Watch" on the list of Hollywood's Most Powerful Authors published by The Hollywood Reporter. In 2018, he made Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people; that same year he was also inducted into The Asian Hall of Fame. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/18/2018.)

Book Reviews
Flashy, funny.… Delicious, the juicy stuff of classic high-society drama.… Rich People Problems is a fun tabloid romp full of over-the-top shenanigans, like a society party brawl that ruins both a Ramon Orlina glass sculpture of the hostess’s breasts and "a special pig that had only eaten truffles its entire life and was flown in from Spain.…" A memorable, laugh-out-loud Asian glitz fest that’s a pure pleasure to read.
Steph Cha - USA Today

I gobbled all three volumes of Kevin Kwan’s gossipy, name-droppy and wickedly funny Crazy Rich Asians trilogy as if they were popcorn. (Really fresh, still-warm popcorn, with that good European butter… but I digress.) The novels, set among three intergenerational and ultrarich Chinese families and peppered with hilarious explanatory footnotes, are set mostly in Singapore but flit easily from one glamorous world city to another.… Irresistible
Moira Macdonald - Seattle Times

Kevin Kwan has done it again. The mastermind behind the delicious Crazy Rich Asians series has drawn a cult-like following with his extravagant tales of Asia’s upper echelon. He’s back at with the series’s final installment, Rich People Problems (rest assured, it’s just as enthralling as the trilogy’s first two volumes).
Isabel Jones - InStyle

[A] hilarious family drama.… This delightfully wicked family saga will have you laughing over your summer daiquiris at the long-buried secrets of Asia’s most privileged families and their rich people problems.
Redbook Magazine

There are a lot of lines in Kevin Kwan’s forthcoming novel Rich People Problems that will make you both roll your eyes and chuckle at the pure absurdity of the characters.… Pure entertainment. Think: Bravo’s Housewives but with a lot more money and, as a result, a lot more drama.
Taylor Bryant - Nylon

Thank god for Kwan.… In Rich People Problems—Kwan’s third installment in his Crazy Rich Asians series—even more insane family hijinks unfold when greed and jealousy get fortune-hungry schemers up in a wild tizzy. Catch up on the whole saga before the film’s release.
W Magazine

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Rich People Problems …then take off on your own:

1. A good place to start a discussion for Rich People Problems is perhaps here: what's wrong with these people? And another starting point: what's funny about them—plastic surgery for a droopy-eyed fish, maybe? (By the way, according to author Kevin Kwan, plastic surgery for fish "absolutely, 100 percent" exists in Singapore.)

2. Characters in all three of Kevin Kwan's novels define themselves by what and how much they own. Talk about the ways in which money and status permeate every social interaction in this book, even the most private relationships. Compare this level of class-consciousness with other well-known stories of the rich and privileged, say, Downton Abbey or even further back in time to say Pride and Prejudice.

3. Talking openly about expensive brands of clothing or cars is prevalent in the book—and in real Singapore high-society, according to Kwan. It's almost like talking about sports, he says, while in the U.S. it's considered flashy and vulgar. What do you think? Is brand-name-dropping simply being honest…or is it boastful?

4. Who is your favorite character and your least favorite? Is anyone authentic in Rich People Problems? Is anyone not obsessed with materialism?

5. The novel is clearly satirical. What is Kwan skewering? Who and what best typifies the object of his satire? What moments seem particularly barbed to you?

6. In China Rich Girlfriend (book two of the trilogy), a family friend tries to warn Nick against possible disinheritance should he marry Rachel: "in everyone's eyes, you are nothing without Tyersall Park," the woman tells him. What does that mean? Might Tyersall Park be considered a sort of character unto itself in this book?

7. This novel makes use of flashbacks to reveal Su Yi's backstory. What do we learn about her past life?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Ride with Me, Mariah Montana
Ivan Doig, 1990
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743271264

Summary
Third in Doig's "McCaskill" Trilogy—Dancing at the Rascal Fair and English Creek (but read Rascal Fair first).

"We are a family that can be kind of stiffbacked," Jick McCaskill reflects with a characteristic sense of life's complications as he narrates this final novel of the "McCaskell" Trilogy.

In English Creek Ivan Doig gave us the West of the l930's; in Dancing at the Rascal Fair, the alluring Rocky Mountain frontier of the late nineteenth century. Now, by way of Jick again and another cast of ineffably believable characters, he brings the story forward to l989, Montana's centennial summer.

Jick, facing age and loss, is jump-started back into adventure and escapade by his red-headed and headlong daughter Mariah, a newspaper photographer: "Pack your socks and come along with me on this," she directs. The grand tour she has in mind is centenary Montana by Winnebago, but the drawback is the reporter assigned with her, restless-minded Riley Wright. "Listen, petunia," says Jick, "I don't even want to be in the same vicinity as that Missoula whistledick, let alone go chasing around the whole state of Montana with him."

But chase around they do, in beguiling encounters with the American road and all the rewards and travails this can bring—among them, a charging buffalo, a senior citizens' used car caravan, astounding bartenders, obtuse admonitions from the home office, and blazing arguments (and a surprising alliance of convenience) between Mariah and Riley.

And just as the centennial is a cause for reflection as well as jubilation, the exuberant travels of this trio bring on "memory storms" that become occasions for reassessment and necessary accommodations of the heart. (From the author's website.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1939
• Where—White Sulphur Springs, Montana, USA
• Death—April 9, 2015
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Education—B.A., M.A., Northwestern University; Ph.D., University of Washington

Ivan Doig was born in Montana to a family of home-steaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles "Charlie" Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth "Bessie" Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain front.

After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, nee Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.

Before he became a novelist, Doig wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service. He has also published two memoirs—This House of Sky (1979) and Heart Earth (1993).

Much of his fiction (more than 10 novels) is set in the Montana country of his youth. His major theme is family life in the past, mixing personal memory and regional history. As the western landscape and people play an important role in his fiction, he has been hailed as the new dean of western literature, a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner. (From Wikipedia.)

Extras
His own words:

• Taking apart a career in such summary sentences always seems to me like dissecting a frog—some of the life inevitably goes out of it—and so I think the more pertinent Ivan Doig for you, Reader, is the red-headed only child, son of ranch hand Charlie Doig and ranch cook Berneta Ringer Doig (who died of her lifelong asthma on my sixth birthday), who in his junior year of high school (Valier, Montana; my class of 1957 had 21 members) made up his mind to be a writer of some kind.

• No one is likely to confuse my writing style with that of Charlotte Bronte, but when that impassioned parson’s daughter lifted her pen from Jane Eyre and bequeathed us the most intriguing of plot summaries—"Reader, I married him"—she also was subliminally saying what any novelist ... must croon to those of you with your eyes on our pages: "Reader, my story is flirting with you; please love it back."

• One last word about the setting of my work, the American West. I don’t think of myself as a "Western" writer. To me, language—the substance on the page, that poetry under the prose—is the ultimate "region," the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression —we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage stamp-size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s nowhere village of Macondo, dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. If I have any creed that I wish you as readers, necessary accomplices in this flirtatious ceremony of writing and reading, will take with you from my pages, it’d be this belief of mine that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
An extravagant celebration filled with devotion, and with passion for its locale, its people, and their history.
Washington Post

Spiced with Doig's inimitable dialogue and colorful characters, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana preserves a cherished bit of America's landscape and history for all of us.
USA Today

Spurred by the 1989 centennial of Montana's statehood, moody widower Jick McCaskill, turning 65, criss-crosses the state in a Winnebago with his photographer daughter, strong-willed, feisty Mariah, and her ex-husband, Riley, a reporter. In this crowning volume of a trilogy, which includes English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair, Doig again displays a masterly skill in depicting the American West which few writers match. Instead of patriotic hoopla, the canvas is dotted with failing ranches, oil pumps clanking away in farmed fields, Montanans tensely poised between an uncertain future and a frontier past. Jick, who narrates this road story with brash humor, faces two emotional crises: Mariah precipitously announces plans to remarry Riley; and Leona, Riley's mother, who once had an ill-fated fling with Jick's dead brother, joins the caravan. This entertaining ramble adroitly blends travelogue, family drama, history and newspaper lore
Publishers Weekly

To explore the meaning of Montana's century of statehood, 65-year-old Jick McCaskill, his photographer daughter Mariah, and her newspaper columnist ex-husband Riley Wright tour the Treasure State in Jick's Winnebago. While Riley writes on-the-scene dispatches and Mariah takes photos of the places they visit, Jick, the narrator, recounts the state's—and his family's—good and bad times. A lengthy picaresque with innumerable well-crafted vignettes, this leisurely novel could easily serve as a tour guide of Montana's historic places. As the miles go by, Riley and Mariah again fall in and out of love, and Jick, a widower, unexpectedly finds a new mate. The culminating volume in the McCaskill trilogy, which includes English Creek and Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), is highly recommended for its depiction of the past's impact on the present. —James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Llb., Alamosa, Col.
Library Journal

A casually artful and triumphant end to Doig's trilogy.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. At one point in Ride with Me, Mariah Montana, Jick muses, "Everything of life picture-size, neatly edged. Wouldn't that be handy, if but true." In one sense, Doig does tie the lives of his characters to the art of photography. Explore the ocular imagery in the novel, particularly as related to Jick and Mariah. How much of the novel is about learning to readjust your eyes to new light?

2. Why is the newspaper business, a vagrant occupation reliant on waves of inspiration, so appealing to Mariah and Riley? Study the articles in the Centennial series and compare/contrast how Mariah with her camera and Riley with his pen respond to the challenge of portraying the West. Why do they steer away from romanticizing the "wistful little town off the beaten path" in their depiction of Montana?

3. Jick remarks that the buttes arising from the heart of Montana's earth are "lone sentinel forms the eye seeks." Why does the eye seek them? How do they inform Jick's invisible landscape, and to what extent is the ranch (also a kind of sentinel) a part of Jick's mental dwelling place?

4. Doig, through the persona of Riley, flexes his storytelling muscles when describing the Baloney Express. Riley writes, "They have seen the majority of Montana's century, each of these seven men old in everything but their restlessness, and as their carefully strewn line of taillights burns a route into the night their stories ember through the decades." Discuss the significance of the encounter with these colorful old men and how their tales prove to be a turning point in the Centennial series.

5. Having read his ancestors' letters with surprise and sorrow, Jick becomes acutely vulnerable. He reflects about Mariah and Riley, "Let history whistle through their ears all it wanted. Mine were ready for a rest." Why does Jick resist reminiscence?

6. Compare the scene at the Nez Perce gravesite with the scene at the gravesite where Alex is buried. Which is harder for Jick to bear—the recollection of his own experience at war or his recollection of the "battle" Alec waged with his family?

7. At the height of his depression, Jick wryly regrets, "People do end up this way, alone in a mobile home of one sort or another, their remaining self shrunken to fit into a metal box." After an exasperated cry for help to his late wife, where, then, does Jick turn? What events, people and thoughts lead him out of his sense of abandonment and urge him to grasp at life with both vigor and calm resolve?

8. In "East of Crazy," Doig describes the wind with subtle imagery. How does the image of the Chinook complement the plot of Mariah and Riley venturing into a questionable second relationship?

9. Jick sums up Riley's character as "the king who never forgot anything but never learned anything either". Explain why Mariah is initially willing to overlook Riley's impenetrable hard-headedness and re-enter a marriage with him. Does Doig lead us to side with Mariah in her final decision?

10. What effect does Leona's revelation of the events leading to her breakup with Alec have on Jick? Could we attribute his subsequent, even stronger desire for her to the fact that he, too, has felt her "dry sorrow beyond tears," and finds consolation in knowing she can relate to his sense of loss. How does this feeling of loss both include and transcend the loss of Alec?

11. In his stories and memoirs, Doig depicts the historic struggle to keep Montana's working ranches alive. Contrast Riley's cynical attitude toward the fate of the Montana ranch with Jick's initial idealism about his own sheep ranch. How does Jick come to terms with the reality of losing what he had worked so hard for?

12. As he did in English Creek, Doig incorporates a dancing scene and a moving speech at the end of Ride with Me, Mariah Montana to frame the emotional development of his characters, Jick and Mariah. Discuss how the style of writing in these passages elevates the reader's attitude toward Jick as father and as rancher and Mariah as daughter and photographer.
(Questions courtesy of the author's website.)

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Ridge (Five Oaks Ranch, 1)
Stephanie Payne Hurt, 2015
Horseshoe Publishing
186 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781507783566

Summary
He’s the oldest son of the Cauthen brood and the hardest of all the siblings. After two tours in Iraq, he returns to the 5 Oaks Ranch to take his place in the business.

But he struggles with nightmares and the memories of everything he’s seen in the last seven years. Always the toughest of the siblings, he’s turned hard edged and even harder to get close to.

But the new veterinarian comes in and starts to chisel her way through his stone facade. She’s drawn to him and his stubbornness. They are at odds with every turn and the electricity that sparks between them is unmistakable. Their story is full of his fight to forget and her struggle to get through to him. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 10, 1968
• Raised—Milner, Georgia, USA
• Education—Griffin Technical Institute
• Currently—lives in Milner, Georgia

Stephanie Payne Hurt has been writing stories since she was a teenager, but only started publishing her work in 2012, 30 years later. The romance genre drew her in at an early age. Since 2012 she's published over 15 Romance novels/novellas.

Stephanie's a busy lady, as a Children's Minister, Accountant, wife, mother, along with being a blogger and writer. Now she owns ting a publishing service called Horseshoe Publishing alongside her editor. It's been an exciting ride and she looks forward to what the future holds for her writing.

Currently she writes romance ranging from Christian, Contemporary, Suspense and Cowboy. Her work is available at many online retailers, on her website and in a bookstore in Zebulon, Georgia near her home.

Head to Stephanie's website to subscribe, get updates, release dates, and her monthly newsletter. Don't forget to join Stephanie's Street Team for all the new updates and to get free chapters of upcoming books and lots of other prizes. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
Ridge by Stephanie Hurt is a novel that will fill your heart. You will feel so much compassion and kindness for Ridge that you will tear up. Ridge is such a nice guy; he is kind and very sweet. This novel showed how pointless wars have destroyed the lives of many men and how they are suffering because they pledged to protect their country. When you sit down to read the novel, keep a tissue box nearby because you will need it. A really good novel. 5 stars!
Rabia Tanveer - Readers' Favorite

This is a love story that follows Ridge Cauthen. He is the eldest son of the Cauthen clan. Ridge fought in the war in Iraq. He is now back home and working on his family's ranch. He by chance meets the new Veterinarian, Mallory. Ridge is dealing with PTSD from his military service. PTSD that includes nightmares, flashbacks and mood swings. Not an ideal time to try and make someone fall in love with you. My favorite part of this story was the amount of love, patience and forgiveness Ridge is shown by his family and friends. I would hope all Veterans would receive the same treatment. I'm not going to tell you if Boy gets Girl you just have to read it for yourself :) 4 Stars.
Lynn F. - Amazon Customer Review

Discussion Questions
1. Did you enjoy the book? Why or why not?

2. Did the plot pull you in or did you have trouble staying interested?

3. Were the characters made real to you through the authors writing?

4. Did the actions of the characters seem plausible? Why or why not?

5. At the end of the book did you feel satisfied or lacking?

6. Which character was your favorite?

7. Did the story line leave you ready for the next book in the series?

8. Would you recommend this book to others?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Riding Lessons
Sara Gruen, 2004
HarperCollins
389 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061549045

Summary
As a world-class equestrian and Olympic contender, Annemarie Zimmer lived for the thrill of flight atop a strong, graceful animal. Then, at eighteen, a tragic accident destroyed her riding career and Harry, the beautiful horse she cherished.

Now, twenty years later, Annemarie is coming home to her dying father's New Hampshire horse farm. Jobless and abandoned, she is bringing her troubled teenage daughter to this place of pain and memory, where ghosts of an unresolved youth still haunt the fields and stables—and where hope lives in the eyes of the handsome, gentle veterinarian Annemarie loved as a girl... and in the seductive allure of a trainer with a magic touch.

But everything will change yet again with one glimpse of a white striped gelding startlingly similar to the one Annemarie lost in another lifetime. And an obsession is born that could shatter her fragile world. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Vancouver, Canada
• Raised—London, Ontario
• Education—Carleton University (Ottawa)
• Currently—lives in western North Carolina

Sara Gruen is the author of the New York Times bestseller Water for Elephants and Riding Lessons. She lives in western North Carolina with her husband, three sons, and a menagerie of rescued animals. (From the publisher.)

More
Sara Gruen is a Canadian-born author, whose books deal greatly with animals; she is a supporter of numerous charitable organizations that support animals and wildlife.

Gruen moved to the U.S. from Canada in 1999 for a technical writing job. When she was laid off two years later, she decided to try her hand at writing fiction. A devoted animal lover, her first novel, Riding Lessons (2004), explored the intimate and often healing spaces between people and animals and was a USA Today bestseller. She wrote a second novel, Flying Changes (2005), also about horses.

Although her first two novels sold several hundred thousands of copies—and Riding Lessons was a best seller—her third release, Water for Elephants, was initially turned down by her publisher at the time, forcing Gruen to find another publisher. That book, of course, went on to become one of the top-selling novels of our time. Readers fell in love with its story of Jacob, the young man tossed by fate onto a rickety circus train that was home to Rosie, the untrainable elephant. This #1 New York Times bestseller has been printed in 44 languages and the movie version (2011) stars Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz, and Robert Pattinson.

Gruen sold her fourth novel, Ape House (2010), on the basis of a 12-page summary to Random House, which won that and another of her novels in a bidding war with 8 other publishers. Ape House features the amazing Bonobo ape. When a number of apes are kidnapped from a language laboratory, their mysterious appearance on a reality TV show calls into question our assumptions about these animals who share 99.4% of our DNA.

Gruen has had a life-long fascination with human-ape discourse, with a particular interest in Bonobo apes. She has studied linguistics and a system of lexigrams in order to communicate with apes, and is one of the few visitors who has been allowed access to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where the apes have come to love her. In bringing her experience and research to bear on her fourth novel, she opens the animal world to us as few novelists have done.

Sara Gruen’s awards include the 2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Award, the Cosmo Fun Fearless Fiction Award, the Bookbrowse Diamond Award for Most Popular Book, the Friends of American Literature Adult Fiction Award and the ALA/Alex Award 2007. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Like The Horse Whisperer, Gruen's polished debut is a tale of human healing set against the primal world of horses. The Olympic dreams of teenaged equestrian Annemarie Zimmer end when her beloved horse, Harry, injures her and destroys himself in a jumping accident. In the agonizing aftermath, she gives up riding and horses entirely. Two decades later, she returns to her family's horse farm a divorcee, with her troubled teenaged daughter, Eve, in tow. There, her gruff Germanic mother struggles to maintain the farm and care for Annemarie's father, who is stricken with ALS. Although Annemarie decides (disastrously) to manage the farm's business, her attention quickly turns to an old and ostensibly worthless horse with the same rare coloring as Harry. Her long-denied passion for riding reawakens as she tracks the horse's identity and eventually discovers it to be Harry's younger brother. She must heal both horse and herself as she struggles with her father's deterioration, Eve's rebellion and her attraction to both the farm's new trainer and her childhood sweetheart Dan. Impulsive and self-absorbed, Annemarie isn't always likable, but Gruen's portrait of the stoic elder Zimmers is beautifully nuanced, as is her evocation of Eve's adolescent troubles. Amid this realistically complex generational sandwich, the book's appealing horse scenes—depicted with unsentimental affection—help build a moving story of loss, survival and renewal.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Annemarie, 18, is a world-class equestrienne who is sure to be a contender in the next Olympics. Then, a terrible jumping accident causes the death of her magnificent horse.... Fans of Nicholas Evans' The Horse Whisperer (1995) and Jessica Bird's impressive debut, Leaping Hearts (2002), will also enjoy this emotion-packed book, which is so exquisitely written it's hard to believe that it's also a debut. —Shelley Mosley
Booklist

Discussion Questions
Riding Lessons features an Olympic-level equestrienne who suffers a devastating accident that ends both her career and the life of her beloved horse. It also sets off a chain of events that doesn't end until twenty years later, when her husband leaves her, she loses her job, and she discovers that her estranged father is dying. In an attempt to pick up the pieces, Annemarie returns to her parents' riding academy with her intransigent teenage daughter. When a mysterious striped horse shows up at a local rescue center, Annemarie begins to slide into an obsession that threatens to destroy her tenuous relationship with her parents, their life's work, and her sanity.

1. Following her accident, Annemarie puts her riding days behind her and moves her life in a completely different direction. Yet the accident and the loss of Harry haunt her and influence her life in ways she doesn't even initially comprehend (e.g. she names her dog Harriet). Do you think we can ever truly leave the past in the past, or does it always follow us? Do you think some people are better-equipped to move on from tragedy than others, and why?

2. The mother-daughter relationship can be a very complicated one, and it is a theme that runs throughout the book. Annemarie's relationship with her mother is strained, just as her relationship with her own teenage daughter is. Annemarie says that motherhood never came naturally to her. Do you think that she let her unresolved problems with own mother affect the way she dealt with Eva? Do you think such cycles always repeat themselves in families, or can they be broken? Why do you think the mother-daughter relationship in particular can be such a volatile one?

3. Mutti helps her ALS-stricken husband end his life. Do you think she did the right thing? Even if it was understandable in this case, should she have been punished for breaking the law? Is helping a seriously ill person die the ultimate act of compassion, or is it playing God?

4. During a steamy encounter with Jean-Claude, which she initiates after he comforts her about Hurrah being taken away, Annemarie stops things before they go too far. Do you think that acting on lustful feelings is a typical reaction for someone going through a difficult time? Annemarie knows, even when she approaches Jean-Claude, that she really loves Dan. Do you think the power of love is ultimately stronger than that of lust?

5. Do you think Annemarie does the right thing when she dyes Hurrah's stripes in order to hide his identity once it is finally revealed? What would you have done in that situation?

6. Annemarie had a relationship with Harry that is unlike any she ever has with a human being, and she forms an equally strong bond with Hurrah. Eva also thrives when she is around horses, particularly Flicka. Do you think that people can have a stronger bond with animals than they do with other humans? What is it that animals can give to us that other people cannot?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Right Swipe
Alisha Rai, 2019
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062878090

Summary
Alisha Rai returns with a sizzling new novel, in which two rival dating app creators find themselves at odds in the boardroom but in sync in the bedroom.

Rhiannon Hunter may have revolutionized romance in the digital world, but in real life she only swipes right on her career—and the occasional hookup. The cynical dating app creator controls her love life with a few key rules:

— Nude pics are by invitation only

— If someone stands you up, block them with extreme prejudice

— Protect your heart

Only there aren't any rules to govern her attraction to her newest match, former pro-football player Samson Lima. The sexy and seemingly sweet hunk woos her one magical night… and disappears.

Rhi thought she'd buried her hurt over Samson ghosting her, until he suddenly surfaces months later, still big, still beautiful—and in league with a business rival. He says he won't fumble their second chance, but she's wary. A temporary physical partnership is one thing, but a merger of hearts?

Surely that’s too high a risk. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Alisha Rai pens award-winning contemporary romances and her novels have been named Best Books of the Year by Washington Post, NPR, Amazon, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, and Cosmopolitan Magazine. When she’s not writing, Alisha is traveling or tweeting. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The plot… feels propulsive and complex…. Much rests on [Rhiannon and Samson's] memories of the strong chemistry they discovered in their first night together. At first this feels like a bit of an emotional shortcut, but the real depth—and much of the book's joy—comes from the natural growth of their mutual trust and connection. It's especially intriguing to watch Rhiannon open up. She's prickly and often emotionally closed-off, but vulnerable, too. She slips between stereotypes, always more complicated than she seems.
New York Times Book Review

(Starred review) [A] luscious contemporary series launch.… Both Rhi and Samson are learning how to enjoy life and balance each other beautifully as they face realistic conflicts and tantalizing romance and sensuality. This winning novel will enhance any romance reader’s collection.
Publishers Weekly

Best-selling author Rai taps into the modern dating-app scene with hilarious, horrifying, and relatable results, blending contemporary social issues, such as sexual harassment in the workplace and CTE brain injuries in sports, into the story. —Melanie C. Duncan, Washington Memorial Lib., Macon, GA
Library Journal

Rai turns up the heat and finds the funny in modern dating…. But it’s not all steamy, as the characters have issues with trust and love, making them vulnerable both to each other and the public.… Rai scores a touchdown.
Booklist

[A] new series by a writer known for her expansive view of what a romance novel can do…. Rai addresses heavy issues without sacrificing passionate sensuality or emotional connection.… An ex-football player woos an entrepreneur in a high-tech romance that proves respect is the most potent love drug.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, 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)

(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O
Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, 2017
HarperCollins
768 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062409164

Summary
A captivating and complex near-future thriller combining history, science, magic, mystery, intrigue, and adventure that questions the very foundations of the modern world.

When Melisande Stokes, an expert in linguistics and languages, accidently meets military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons in a hallway at Harvard University, it is the beginning of a chain of events that will alter their lives and human history itself.

The young man from a shadowy government entity approaches Mel, a low-level faculty member, with an incredible offer. The only condition: she must sign a nondisclosure agreement in return for the rather large sum of money.

Tristan needs Mel to translate some very old documents, which, if authentic, are earth-shattering. They prove that magic actually existed and was practiced for centuries. But the arrival of the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment weakened its power and endangered its practitioners.

Magic stopped working altogether in 1851, at the time of the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace — the world’s fair celebrating the rise of industrial technology and commerce. Something about the modern world "jams" the "frequencies" used by magic, and it’s up to Tristan to find out why.

And so the Department of Diachronic Operations — D.O.D.O.— gets cracking on its real mission: to develop a device that can bring magic back, and send Diachronic Operatives back in time to keep it alive … and meddle with a little history at the same time. But while Tristan and his expanding operation master the science and build the technology, they overlook the mercurial — and treacherous — nature of the human heart.

Written with the genius, complexity, and innovation that characterize all of Neal Stephenson’s work and steeped with the down-to-earth warmth and humor of Nicole Galland’s storytelling style, this exciting and vividly realized work of science fiction will make you believe in the impossible, and take you to places — and times — beyond imagining. (From the publisher.)

Author Bios
Neal Stephenson
• Birth—October 31, 1959
• Raised—Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Ames, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Boston University
• Awards—2 Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington

Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer and game designer known for his works of science fiction, historical fiction, cyber- and postcyber-punk.

Stephenson's work explores subjects such as mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired.

Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He is currently Magic Leap's Chief Futurist.

Background
Born in Fort Meade, Maryland, Stephenson came from a family of engineers and scientists; his father was a professor of electrical engineering while his paternal grandfather was a physics professor. His mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, and her father was a biochemistry professor.

Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1960 and then to Ames, Iowa, in 1966 where he graduated from high school in 1977.

He went on to stydy at Boston University, first specializing in physics, then switching to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in geography and a minor in physics.

In 1984, Stephenson published his first novel, The Big U — a satirical take on life at American Megaversity, a vast, bland and alienating research university beset by chaotic riots. His breakthrough novel came in 1992 with Snow Crash, a comic novel in the late cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk tradition. It was was the first of Stephenson's epic science fiction novels.

Successive novels deal with futurism, technology, World War II cryptology, metaphysics, ancient Greek philosophy, and international crime/terrorism (a thriller). He has also writen historical fiction, the Baroque Cycle — a series of eight books set in the 17th and 18th centuries, one of which won the 2005 Prometheus Award.

In May 2010, the Subutai Corporation, of which Stephenson was named chairman, announced the production of an experimental multimedia fiction project called The Mongoliad, which centered around a narrative written by Stephenson and other speculative fiction authors, including Nicole Galland (see below).

In 2012, Stephenson launched a Kickstarter campaign for CLANG, a realistic sword fighting fantasy game. The concept of the game was to use motion control to provide an immersive experience. The campaign's funding goal of $500,000 was reached by the target date of July 9, 2012 on Kickstarter, but the project ran out of money and finally closed down in 2014.

Seveneves, a science fiction novel, came out in 2015, and plans have been announced to adapt it for the screen. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/12/2017 .)

Nicole Galland
• Birth—ca. 1965
• Raised—West Tisbury (Martha's Vineyard), Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University
• Currently—lives on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts

Nicole Galland is an American novelist, first known for her historical fiction. Then, in 2017 she switched genres to publish a near-future thriller, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., with Neal Stephenson. She has also published a contemporary comic novel, Stepdog, and using the pseudonym E.D. de Birmingham, she wrote Book Five of the Mongoloid Cycle. Mongoloid, a historical-epic-fantasy, is a collaborative effort of several speculative writers, including Neal Stephenson (see above.)

Background
Galland was born in New York, but grew up in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, a farming community on the island of Martha's Vineyard, where her maternal family has roots going back to the 18th century. Her mother works as a nurse and her stepfather, a Viet Nam vet, was a Physician’s Assistant at Martha’s Vineyard only hospital.

She studied theater and earned a degree at Harvard in Comparative Religion with a focus in Buddhism. Although she received a full fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in Drama at the University of California at Berkeley, she withdrew following a violent and bizarre assault at gunpoint. Traumatized by the encounter, she would eventually use it as fodder in her writing.

Moving back and forth between east and west coasts, and a stint on the Mediterranean, Galland spent her 20s and 30s working in theater, teaching, editing and juggling various odd jobs. This included co-founding a teen theater company in California that debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. She once described her eclectic life as existing at the whim of serendipity.

Her screenplay, The Winter Population, won an award in 1998 but has yet to be produced. When her first novel, The Fool’s Tale, was published in 2005, she left her position as Literary Manager/Dramaturge at Berkeley Repertory Theatre to write full-time. While at Berkeley Rep she had written Revenge of the Rose, her second novel, and her third, Crossed: A Tale of the Fourth Crusade, was written over a 2-year period during which she essentially lived out of a backpack.

Having resided in the California Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City for years, Galland returned to Martha's Vineyard to live full-time. She is married to actor Billy Meleady.

In addition to her novels, Galland has written for Salon.com and several Vineyard-based publications, including the Vineyard Gazette, Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, and Edible Vineyard, of which she is a contributing editor

Galland has been involved in Vineyard theater, working at the Vineyard Playhouse and with ArtFarm Enterprises. She is co-founder, with Chelsea McCarthy, of Shakespeare for the Masses, an off-season series presenting irreverent adaptations Shakespeare’s plays on the Vineyard. And finally, a point of trivia, she appears in the CD-ROM Star Wars: Rebel Assault II as Ina Rece. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/12/2017.)

Book Reviews
[T]hough it’s no comic classic, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is big, roomy and enjoyable. The historical scenes are refreshingly unembarrassed by their hey-nonny-nonnyisms. The characters are lively, the plot moves along and the whole thing possesses heart and charm. And you don’t need me to tell you whether it tends towards a tragic or comic denouement. You can guess
Adam Roberts - Guardian (UK)

Quantum physics, witchcraft, and multiple groups with conflicting agendas, playfully mixed with vernacular from several centuries and a dizzying number of acronyms, create a fascinating experiment in speculation and metafiction that never loses sight of the human foibles and affections of its cast.
Publishers Weekly

According to the dusty old documents military intelligence operator Tristan Lyons asks linguistics expert Melisande Stokes to translate, magic actually existed until the scientific revolution. The government's Department of Diachronic Operations aims to get it back.
Library Journal

(Starred review.) Immense and immensely entertaining genre-hopping yarn.… Blend time travel with Bourne-worthy skulduggery, throw in lashings of technology and dashes of steampunk.… A departure for both authors and a pleasing combination of much appeal to fans of speculative fiction.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O … then take off on your own:

1. Talk about Triston Lyones and Melisande Stokes. How would you describe them, their skills, personalities, inner strengths and weaknesses, desires, fears?

2. Why does Tristan hire Melisande? What are her skill sets that he believes qualifies her to do the work?

3. What does Melisande come to learn about the manuscripts? What are they in such good shape despite their age?

4. (Follow-up to Question 3) How was magic vanished or at least brought to an end? Where did it go? Explain the role photography played in its demise.

5. Talk about Doctor Frank Oda and his role in all this.

6. How about Erszebet Karpaty? And the Irish witch?

7. Talk about the D.O.D.O. — and the joke that runs for about 150 pages to uncover its full name. Did you find it amusing?

8. (Follow-up to Question 7) How would you describe the growth of D.O.D.O mirror into a bureaucracy: to what extent is the novel a satirical mirror of real life institutions?

9. There is a blizzard of memos back & forth. What were your feelings about them? Funny. Informative? Tiresome? Too many?

10. Were you able to pick up references to Shakespeare or, say, Monty Python? What do you think about the chapter sub-headings written in an 18th or 19th century style?

11. Comment on the conspiratorial machinations of The Fuggers (btw, there really is a Fugger bank dynasty, going back to the 14th century).

12. How did you experience Neal Stephenson's melding of technobabble with magic?

13. (Follow-up to Question 12) What challenges might be presented were time travel a possibility? How does Stephenson describe the technical issues?

14. What does the novel have to say about the human proclivity for foolishness?
'
15. Well, what do you think of the book? The ending — satisfying or not?
(Questions issued by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Rise & Fall of Great Powers: A Novel
Tom Rachman, 2014
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679643654

Summary
Following one of the most critically acclaimed fiction debuts in years, New York Times bestselling author Tom Rachman returns with a brilliant, intricately woven novel about a young woman who travels the world to make sense of her puzzling past.

Tooly Zylberberg, the American owner of an isolated bookshop in the Welsh countryside, conducts a life full of reading, but with few human beings. Books are safer than people, who might ask awkward questions about her life. She prefers never to mention the strange events of her youth, which mystify and worry her still.

Taken from home as a girl, Tooly found herself spirited away by a group of seductive outsiders, implicated in capers from Asia to Europe to the United States. But who were her abductors? Why did they take her? What did they really want? There was Humphrey, the curmudgeonly Russian with a passion for reading; there was the charming but tempestuous Sarah, who sowed chaos in her wake; and there was Venn, the charismatic leader whose worldview transformed Tooly forever. Until, quite suddenly, he disappeared.

Years later, Tooly believes she will never understand the true story of her own life. Then startling news arrives from a long-lost boyfriend in New York, raising old mysteries and propelling her on a quest around the world in search of answers.

Tom Rachman—an author celebrated for humanity, humor, and wonderful characters—has produced a stunning novel that reveals the tale not just of one woman but of the past quarter-century as well, from the end of the Cold War to the dominance of American empire to the digital revolution of today.

Leaping between decades, and from Bangkok to Brooklyn, this is a breathtaking novel about long-buried secrets and how we must choose to make our own place in the world. It will confirm Rachman’s reputation as one of the most exciting young writers we have. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1974
• Where—London, England, UK
• Raised—Vancouver, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in London

Tom Rachman was born in London and raised in Vancouver, Canada. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Columbia School of Journalism, he has been a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Rome. From 2006 to 2008, he worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He lives in London.

The Imperfectionsists (2010) is his first novel; The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (2014) his second, followed by The Italian Teacher (2018). (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/09/2014.)

Book Reviews
The tale begins to wobble in the second chapter, as Tooly...shows signs that she may be as zany as her name suggests.... [W]e are told that she is wearing mismatched Converse sneakers, one black and one red. She also, we learn, plays the ukulele in her spare time. So it’s going to be like that. Suddenly, in the middle of her long walk, like someone in a musical, she bursts "into a sprint.... Then she halts, "breathless and grinning" (Tooly tends to grin, and frown, and squeal), because she has a "secret." And her secret is that she has "nowhere to run, no place to hasten toward, not in this city or in the world." I’m afraid Tooly has another secret: She is annoying.
Jim Windolf - New York Times Book Review

This book is mesmerising: a thorough work-out for the head and heart that targets cognitive muscles you never knew you had. Thanks, though, to Rachman’s lightness of touch and quite considerable streaks of silliness, it feels much more like dancing than exercise.
Times (UK)

Some novels are such good company that you don’t want them to end; Tom Rachman knows this, and has pulled off the feat of writing one.... Rachman has written a hugely likeable, even loveable book about the people we meet and how they shape us.
Telegraph (UK)

A bookshop-lover’s book, and beautiful prose-lover’s book, and read-it-all-in-one-weekend book.
New Republic

[A] suspenseful novel that whisks readers around the world [in a]...coming-of-age story.... The novel weaves a critique of modern society through Tooly’s odyssey, with a cast of characters grappling with the mundane realities of the 21st century. The novel loses steam toward the end, but the journey is still worth taking.
Publishers Weekly

Rachman follows his breakout debut, The Imperfectionists, with a novel featuring an American named Tooly Zylberberg, who runs a bookstore in Wales. Tooly is still confused after being abducted as a child and shuttled worldwide by book-loving Russian Humphrey, sexy Sarah, and mysterious ringleader Venn. Now she's trying to find out what really happened to her.
Library Journal

[Rachman's novel] spans the last 30 years in [a ]tale of a rocky road to adulthood. Over the course of flashbacks and fast-forward escapades, Tooly gradually pieces together the jigsaw of her unconventional life.... Rachman’s kaleidoscopic second novel demonstrates that one’s family is very often made up of the people you find and who find you along the way. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

(Starred review.) [T]he haunting tale of a young woman reassessing her turbulent past.... [T]he overwhelming emotions here are loss and regret, as Tooly realizes how she was alienated from her own best instincts by a charismatic sociopath. Brilliantly structured, beautifully written and profoundly sad.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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Rise and Shine
Anna Quindlen, 2006
Random House
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616850425

Summary
From Anna Quindlen, acclaimed author of Blessings; Black and Blue; and One True Thing, a superb novel about two sisters, the true meaning of success, and the qualities in life that matter most.

It’s an otherwise ordinary Monday when Meghan Fitzmaurice’s perfect life hits a wall. A household name as the host of Rise and Shine, the country’s highest-rated morning talk show, Meghan cuts to a commercial break–but not before she mutters two forbidden words into her open mike.

In an instant, it’s the end of an era, not only for Meghan, who is unaccustomed to dealing with adversity, but also for her younger sister, Bridget, a social worker in the Bronx who has always lived in Meghan’s long shadow. The effect of Meghan’s on-air truth telling reverberates through both their lives, affecting Meghan’s son, husband, friends, and fans, as well as Bridget’s perception of her sister, their complex childhood, and herself.

What follows is a story about how, in very different ways, the Fitzmaurice women adapt, survive, and manage to bring the whole teeming world of New York to heel by dint of their smart mouths, quick wits, and the powerful connection between them that even the worst tragedy cannot shatter. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 8, 1952
• Where—Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column
• Currently—New York, New York

Anna Quindlen could have settled onto a nice, lofty career plateau in the early 1990s, when she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her New York Times column; but she took an unconventional turn, and achieved a richer result.

Quindlen, the third woman to hold a place among the New York Times' Op-Ed columnists, had already published two successful collections of her work when she decided to leave the paper in 1995. But it was the two novels she had produced that led her to seek a future beyond her column.

Quindlen had a warm, if not entirely uncritical, reception as a novelist. Her first book, Object Lessons, focused on an Irish American family in suburban New York in the 1960s. It was a bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book of 1991, but was also criticized for not being as engaging as it could have been. One True Thing, Quindlen's exploration of an ambitious daughter's journey home to take care of her terminally ill mother, was stronger still—a heartbreaker that was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep. But Quindlen's fiction clearly benefited from her decision to leave the Times. Three years after that controversial departure, she earned her best reviews yet with Black and Blue, a chronicle of escape from domestic abuse.

Quindlen's novels are thoughtful explorations centering on women who may not start out strong, but who ultimately find some core within themselves as a result of what happens in the story. Her nonfiction meditations—particularly A Short Guide to a Happy Life and her collection of "Life in the 30s" columns, Living Out Loud—often encourage this same transition, urging others to look within themselves and not get caught up in what society would plan for them. It's an approach Quindlen herself has obviously had success with.

Extras
• To those who expressed surprise at Quindlen's apparent switch from columnist to novelist, the author points out that her first love was always fiction. She told fans in a Barnes & Noble.com chat, "I really only went into the newspaper business to support my fiction habit, but then discovered, first of all, that I loved reporting for its own sake and, second, that journalism would be invaluable experience for writing novels."

• Quindlen joined Newsweek as a columnist in 1999. She began her career at the New York Post in 1974, jumping to the New York Times in 1977.

• Quindlen's prowess as a columnist and prescriber of advice has made her a popular pick for commencement addresses, a sideline that ultimately inspired her 2000 title A Short Guide to a Happy Life Quindlen's message tends to be a combination of stopping to smell the flowers and being true to yourself. Quindlen told students at Mount Holyoke in 1999, "Begin to say no to the Greek chorus that thinks it knows the parameters of a happy life when all it knows is the homogenization of human experience. Listen to that small voice from inside you, that tells you to go another way. George Eliot wrote, 'It is never too late to be what you might have been.' It is never too early, either. And it will make all the difference in the world."

• Studying fiction at Barnard with the literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick, Quindlen's senior thesis was a collection of stories, one of which she sold to Seventeen magazine. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Anna Quindlen has developed an enormously likable writing voice, and by telling her tale through the humble voice of an unassuming naif, she allows her readers the illusion that we all might live securely within the velvety pink confines of the New York maw, safely out of the way of those silver teeth. She makes the city accessible and downright neighborly.
Carolyn See - Washington Post

Moving from the fetid tenements of the Bronx to the ethereal penthouses of Manhattan, Quindlen pens a lavishly perceptive homage to the city she loves, while her transcendentally agile and empathic observations of the human condition underlie the Fitzmaurice sisters' discovery of the transience of fame and the permanence of family. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

Bridget Fitzmaurice, the narrator of Quindlen's engrossing fifth novel, works for a women's shelter in the Bronx; her older sister, Meghan, cohost of the popular morning show Rise and Shine, is the most famous woman on television. Bridget acts as a second mother to the busy Meghan's college student son, Leo; Meghan barely tolerates Bridget's significant other, a gritty veteran police detective named Irving Lefkowitz. After 9/11 (which happens off-camera) and the subsequent walking out of Meghan's beleaguered husband, Evan, Meghan calls a major politician a "fucking asshole" before her microphone gets turned off for a commercial, and Megan and Bridget's lives change forever. As Bridget struggles to mend familial fences and deal with reconfigurations in their lives wrought by Meghan's single phrase, Quindlen has her lob plenty of pungent observations about both life in class-stratified New York City and about family dynamics. The situation is ripe with comic potential, which Bridget deadpans her way through, and Quindlen goes along with Bridget's cool reserve and judgmentalism. The plot is very imbalanced: a couple of events early, then virtually nothing until a series of major revelations in the last 50 or so pages. The prose is top-notch; readers may be more interested in Quindlen's insights than in the lives of her two main characters.
Publishers Weekly

Orphaned in childhood, sisters Meghan and Bridget have grown up to be pillars in each other's lives. Meghan, a nationally known television personality hosting Rise and Shine, the nation's number one morning show, lives a cushy celebrity life. Younger sister Bridget toils in a modest, sometimes dispiriting career as a social worker. Meghan is married with a personable teenaged son; Bridget lives with a jaded, crusty cop who doesn't want kids. Meghan suffers a fall from grace after a muttered profanity into a live microphone shocks the nation. Her plunge into public disgrace triggers both sisters' soul searching and realigns their lives. The New York City backdrop allows Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Newsweek columnist Quindlen to wield her powers of observation and description to establish a true sense of place. Actress Carol Monda's clear, nontheatrical diction is unobtrusive, casting the spotlight on the narrative. Recommended for public libraries. —Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. Rise and Shine centers on the unique bond of sisterhood–potentially one of the most supportive, competitive, and difficult relationships in life. Describe Bridget and Meghan’s relationship and how each woman views her sister, and herself. What roles do they each play? Does this portrait of sisterhood reflect your own relationship with a sibling, or perhaps with a close friend? Do you identify with one of the Fitzmaurice sisters more than the other?

2. Meghan’s audacious on-air slip, and its repercussions, incites the novel’s forward action. How would you judge the seasoned anchorwoman’s mistake? Was she wrong to let her personal opinion and emotions show? Do you believe that the network’s reaction was justified? Finally, what was the public’s response to Meghan’s fall from grace?

3. Describe Anna Quindlen’s portrait of New York City. Is the Big Apple “unequivocally the center of the universe,” as some New Yorkers believe? Compare Bridget and Tequila’s experiences at the shelter with Meghan’s worldview from the Upper East Side. How does Quindlen attempt to capture all sides of the city?

4. Describe Meghan and Bridget’s conflicting perceptions and memories of their mother. How does the loss of their mother shape the Fitzgerald sisters’ lives and ways of relating to each other? What role does Aunt Maureen play?

5. Is Evan justified in leaving Meghan, or do you agree with Bridget, that there must have been another woman in the picture right from the start? What factors led to the failure of their relationship? How does Bridget deal with the breakup? Meghan?

6. Meghan retreats to Jamaica to escape the turmoil in her life and, in doing so, detaches from her old persona and responsibilities. What did you think of this episode? Was Meghan being selfish by isolating herself? How did it affect Leo? Bridget? Or was this period in Meghan’s life necessary and inevitable? Finally, discuss the outcome of the trip. Does Meghan sustain this growth of character when she reenters the real world? How about Bridget?

7. What attracts Bridget to Irving Lefkowitz? Describe Irving’s attitude toward children and his reaction to Bridget’s unexpected news. Will this relationship work for Bridget? Why or why not?

8. Bridget’s daily experience in New York City is marked by relationships with “familiar strangers.” What does she mean by this? Are there “familiar strangers” in your own life?

9. Discuss Meghan’s role in apprehending the shooter in the Tubman projects; was her involvement self-serving, or was she defending her son and the safety of others? What were her true motivations, and how were her actions perceived? Do you agree with Meghan’s decision to take matters into her own hands?

10. Quindlen writes in the first person, from Bridget’s perspective. What effect does this narrative viewpoint have on the story? How would the book be different if it were told from Meghan’s point of view?

11. In the last few pages of the novel, Quindlen writes, “Does someone have to break so someone else can be whole?” (p. 268). Who in Rise and Shine breaks, and who has been made whole? Is there more than one way to think about this question?

12. The dust jacket for Rise and Shine shows a beautiful butterfly, a symbol of metamorphosis. How does the concept of change apply to the characters in the novel? Consider, especially, Meghan and Bridget, Evan, Leo, Irving, Tequila, and Princess Margaret. Have you undergone similar changes in your own life? Finally, how did your opinion of the Fitzmaurice sisters, and your assessment of their relative strengths and weaknesses, evolve over the course of the novel?

13. What do you think defines a “successful” life? According to your definition, who is the most successful character in Rise and Shine? Does success equal happiness? How does that concept play out in the novel, and what do Bridget and Meghan come to understand by the end?

14. Does Rise and Shine have a happy ending? What new directions and challenges face the Fitzmaurice sisters, Leo, Irving, and the others?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Risking Exposure
Jeanne Moran, 2013
CreateSpace
182 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781492179825

Summary
Munich, Germany, 1938. The Nazis are in power and war is on the horizon. The law makes fourteen-year old Sophie Adler a member of Hitler Youth; her talent makes her an amateur photographer.

Then she contracts polio. During her long hospitalization, her Youth leader supplies her with film. Photographs she takes of fellow polio patients are turned into propaganda, mocking people with disabilities. Sophie’s new disability has changed her status. She’s now an outsider, a target of Nazi scorn and possible persecution. Her only weapon is her camera.

Can she find the courage to separate from the crowd, photograph the full truth, and risk exposure? (From the author.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 9, 1956
• Raised—New York City, New York and environs (USA)
• Education—N/A
• Currently—Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania

In her words:
I am the sister of a person with a disability and have spent my career as a pediatric physical therapist. Risking Exposure is a historical fiction novel in which the protagonist, a young teen who wants to blend in with the Nazi regime in which she lives, contracts polio. As she copes with her new disability, she gains personal strength and decides to stand up for what she feels is right.
I love to read and write stories in which unlikely heroes make a difference in their corner of the world. In my everyday life, I try to be one of them. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.
Visit Jeanne on Facebook.

Book Reviews
[A]n incredibly powerful novel about WWII. Not many books discuss the treatment of handicapped individuals at the hands of Nazi Germany. This novel is well written and pretty accurate. I think this is a great novel for young adults because so few young adult novels accurately portray the atrocities committed by Nazis. I think the character of Sophie will stick with me for a long time. This is the best young adult novel I have read in a long time and I can't wait until my nieces and nephews are old enough to read it.
Goodreads reviewer

Risking Exposure shines a light on Nazi Germany not often explored: the treatment of the disabled by the Nazis. Sophie Alder is a deeply compelling character and her struggle to find courage within herself was engaging. This book is perfect for young readers and would make an excellent addition to World War II centered curriculum.
Goodreads reviewer

Because the story and characters continue to resonate, Risking Exposure is ideal for book discussions or classrooms. It’s geared for young adults, but could certainly find an audience with readers past their school years.
Amazon customer review

Risking Exposure is an engaging, well written, thought provoking book. It reminds us of the responsibility we have to one another.
Amazon customer review

[W]hat makes a novel extraordinary? That the characters become so real to us that we carry them in our hearts forever. Sophie is one of those characters and this is one of those books.
Amazon customer review

This is a novel that will leave you wanting more. It tackles a moral dilemma from the teenage point of view during one of the worst periods of time in history. It's a great read!!!
Barnes and Noble customer review

Discussion Questions
1. In the beginning of the novel, Sophie is happy to belong to a group of ‘insiders.’ She is reluctant to act in a way that may mark her as different from them, even though she doesn’t always like what they do. In what situations have you noticed people behaving that way? Have you behaved that way yourself?

2. Sophie’s photos are used as propaganda, defined by Webster’s New World Dictionary as “the widespread promotion of particular ideas and doctrines.” Think about the way today’s media promotes certain ideas. How does this promotion influence your thinking? Do you accept commonly held views as your own or do you research answers for yourself?

3. Think about courage and how Sophie showed courage at the end of the novel. Did she ‘learn how’ to show it or was it always there? What factors brought it out? Do you wonder about your ability to be brave when faced with danger or the threat of harm?

4. Some people around Sophie held true to their morals and ideals and others didn’t. Should morals influenced by the people around you, by the school you attend, or the town or country in which you live? Do you think your own morals can or should change during your lifetime, or should they always be the same?

5. The Nazi pogrom called T4 exterminated tens of thousands of residents of hospitals for the mentally ill, nursing homes, and facilities for the developmentally disabled. Were you aware of this pogrom, or similar actions taken against people who were deaf, homosexual, or Jehovah’s Witness? Why do you think pogroms against Jews and political prisoners are more widely known?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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The River at Night
Erica Ferencik, 2017
Gallery/Scout Press
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501143199

Summary
A high-stakes drama set against the harsh beauty of the Maine wilderness, charting the journey of four friends as they fight to survive the aftermath of a white water rafting accident, The River at Night is a nonstop and unforgettable thriller by a stunning new voice in fiction.

Winifred Allen needs a vacation.

Stifled by a soul-crushing job, devastated by the death of her beloved brother, and lonely after the end of a fifteen-year marriage, Wini is feeling vulnerable. So when her three best friends insist on a high-octane getaway for their annual girls’ trip, she signs on, despite her misgivings.

What starts out as an invigorating hiking and rafting excursion in the remote Allagash Wilderness soon becomes an all-too-real nightmare: A freak accident leaves the women stranded, separating them from their raft and everything they need to survive. When night descends, a fire on the mountainside lures them to a ramshackle camp that appears to be their lifeline.

But as Wini and her friends grasp the true intent of their supposed saviors, long buried secrets emerge and lifelong allegiances are put to the test. To survive, Wini must reach beyond the world she knows to harness an inner strength she never knew she possessed.

With intimately observed characters, visceral prose, and pacing as ruthless as the river itself, The River at Night is a dark exploration of creatures—both friend and foe—that you won’t soon forget. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 21, 1958
• Where—Urbana, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Massachusetts-Boston, M.F.A., Boston University
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts

Erica Ferencik is a Massachusetts-based novelist, screenwriter and stand-up comic. She was born in Urbana, Illinois, and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting and French from University of Massachusetts. Later she earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Boston University.

Ferencik did stand-up comedy for ten years at various comedy clubs in Boston and New York and was also a material writer for David Letterman during the early years of his national late-night show.

Most recently, Ferencik is the author of The River at Night (2016), as well as Repeaters (2011), and Cracks in the Foundation (2008). Her work has appeared in Salon and the Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/20/2017.)

Book Reviews
This novel quickly becomes a dark, more-twisted-than-the-river tale of secrets as night falls in the wilderness.
Marie Claire

Author Erica Ferencik’s storytelling [is]…brutally effective…hurtling <emRiver’s harrowing narrative along in a visceral, white-knuckle rush.
Entertainment Weekly

Ferencik's debut novel is a must-read for anyone who loves high intensity thrillers. Her use of foreshadowing and flair for suspense is impeccable.... Rich imagery and attention to detail are just a few of the reasons why Ferencik is one of the best new thriller writers out there!
Romance Times Book Reviews

[An] adrenaline rush.... Set over five days, this adventure tests the women’s friendship while also depicting their resilience. Fans of John Dickey’s Deliverance will enjoy this current take on the wilderness survival tale.
Publishers Weekly

[T]his exciting survival tale...hooks from the first page, but it is the strong character development that really stands out. Wini is a compelling heroine, a flawed woman whose fears and regrets are fleshed out by flashbacks.... The friendships...are well drawn and believable. —Lynnanne Pearson, Skokie P.L., IL
Library Journal

A gal-pal vacation goes over the falls and into hell....[A]t a certain point Ferencik’s latest takes a turn for the bloody and deranged. The wilderness adventure part of this book is excellent; the heart-of-darkness horror movie in the third act less so. Still, you won’t put it down.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. “The woods on either side grew dense, impenetrable, alive with their own logic and intelligence” (page 38). Discuss how nature, specifically the woods and the river, act as a character in the novel.

2. The book opens with a quote by Henry David Thoreau. Consider the quote in relation to Simone and Dean, as well as the relationships between Pia, Rachel, Sandra, and Wini. Why do you think the author chose to start the novel with this quote?

3. Concerns about aging and the passing of time come up frequently in The River at Night. Why do you think age becomes a factor in Pia’s encounter with Rory? Why does age matter in terms of Rory’s expertise as a guide? Discuss how age plays a role in the novel and within your own lives.

4. The women use Pia and Rory’s sexual encounter to unearth some frustrations they have with one another. Discuss the strength of their bonds and how a trip like this may have forced them to reconcile previous tensions more than a less stressful vacation would have.

5. Wini, Pia, Rachel, and Sandra have long been friends—but they have strikingly different personalities. Which of the women do you relate to the most? The least? Discuss the reasons as a group.

6. On page 51, the characters learn that the river is largely on public property. Sandra goes so far as to say, “Nobody owns a river, right?” Is there an underlying message about conservation and environmentalism in the novel? Discuss what other ways a river, forest, or public park might be “owned.”

7. Wini, Rachel, Sandra, and Pia have experienced heartache in many different ways. Whose heartache do you relate to the most? The least?

8. In Chapter 7, just before the women truly commence their trip, Wini remembers her last camping experience. Discuss how the loss of her brother affects Wini’s life and how this flashback weaves its way into the rest of the novel.

9. Discuss the two major deaths in this novel. How are they different? What strikes you most about Rory’s passing? About Sandra’s? Do you think that either could have been prevented?

10. As the antagonist of the story, Simone can be seen as ruthless, deadly, and potentially crazy. One could argue, however, that Simone is just another survivor in the novel. Do you think the author means for her to be more than the villain? Why or why not?

11. “This raft—any raft—flips, and when it does, you have to be prepared. You get no warning. You need to always be ready to be upside down and in that water” (page 125). Discuss what it means to be prepared. Which of the women would you trust most to help should you find yourself lost in a similar situation? Which qualities do you believe are most necessary for surviving in the woods?

12. When the trip is over, the women attempt to get back to normalcy. Wini, however, becomes legal guardian over Dean. Does her decision surprise you?

13. Traveling with a group (or a partner) can often strengthen a friendship. Do you think the trip brought these women closer together? Why or why not?

14. Have you ever been in a situation where you say yes to something—even while feeling fearful or deeply distrustful—because you want to be part of a group? What has been the result?

15. The River at Night references loneliness many times, especially in the context of female friendships. Do you feel that the nature of your close friendships has changed over the years? If so, why, and how have you coped with these changes?

16. Fear plays a big role in this book. A natural survival mechanism, fear speeds our reaction times, energizing the muscles for a swifter escape. But what about the role of fear in modern life? Does it ever play a negative role?

17. What is your relationship with nature? Fearful, comfortable, awe-inspired, disgusted, indifferent? Has it changed over the years? If so, in what ways?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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A River in the Ocean
Michael Allen, 2013
Createspace
264 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781482323405

Summary
When a near fatal accident separates a single father from his daughter, fate has a way of finding her a good home.

While Chris fights for his life in a coma for nine years, his daughter Krista is raised by a well-intentioned couple who have no idea how to properly raise a child. Gilmer has wild ideas that he doesn’t think through. Maggie knows the basics and figures the rest out as she goes. But there is one thing they have in common, the love for the little girl who stole their hearts while her father was absent.

When Chris awakens from his coma, he has no idea he has a daughter. Putting his life back together, he takes to furniture repair and then design. But he picks up a paint brush one day when an apparition of a little girl soon starts haunting him even while he is awake. He captures scenes of her on canvas, but he can’t figure out what connection they have. While he paints his little angel, she becomes more and more real to him.

Something stirs in both of them when Chris and Krista finally meet late in her teen years. It's certainly a drama, but with comedy to lighten the way.

A River in the Ocean is a heartwarming tale about two lost souls, only one of them feels it and the other has yet to know. He didn’t know he was looking. She didn’t know she needed found. It leads to an overwhelming confusion with the potential to push them together or drive them apart. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Born—Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA
• Raised—in Maryland and Virginia
• Education—B.A., Frostburg State University
• Currently—lives in Clearwater, Florida

Michael Allen was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. But he was quickly moved from there to be raised in both Cumberland, Maryland, and Fredericksburg, Virginia. He finally graduated from James Monroe High School in Fredericksburg and went straight into the Marine Corps.

In 1993, Michael was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps and had some wild oats to sow before finally settling down to earn his B.A. in English from Frostburg State University. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, he was quick to learn that plenty of people would be willing to hire him to write their books.

Over twenty books later, Michael has been able to also publish four books of his own. A Danger to Society is loosely based on a true story. When You Miss Me is a children’s book originally written for his daughter. Thoughts and Reconsideration is a journey in poetry through themes of Love, Hate, Spirituality and Philosophy. A River in the Ocean is his fourth book.

Michael currently resides in Clearwater, Florida where he adores the sun, makes his name known along the beaches and volunteers as often as he can. If he’s not substituting to teach English as a second language, he’s filling up plates at a soup kitchen.

When his daughter hit her teenage years, she left him in the dust as most teenagers do to parents they no longer find cool. So if he’s not busy helping people, he tucks himself away in his “cave” tapping steadily away at his next piece of work. (From the author.)

Visit Michael's website.

Book Reviews
(Although A River in the Ocean has not yet garnered reviews, we have included excerpts of two interviews with author Michael Allen by online book sites.)

I was about six years old when I first started writing. At least, that's as far back as I can remember. My first work was a a poem I called Slick Move. It was about people slipping on banana peels and oil slicks. Very age appropriate material. I would have to say it's just something that has always been in my blood, writing many short stories and poems in my youth. But my first contact with a publisher who hired me to write a book was when I realized that I could really do something with it. So, I dedicated myself to it.
Book Junkies Journal

I get to know my characters is about the best way to answer that question. I think them through and know how they would act, how they would talk if they were real. I do not think I’ve ever had a conversation with one of my characters though. But, it does sound like something I would do.
Book Goodies

Discussion Questions
1. What defines family today in the world of broken families?

2. What do you think makes a good parent?

3. Have you ever felt an emptiness or void in your life that actually compelled you to find out what it was about? What did you learn?

4. Have you ever lost anyone who was close to you? How hard was it for you to let go?

5. How would you feel if you suddenly learned that someone you thought you lost had not actually passed away?

6. What would you do if you found yourself having to start over in life?

7. Do you think there’s a special bond family members share, even if they have never met or have been separated for a very long time?

8. What is the significance of the book's title?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)

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The River of No Return
Bee Ridgway, 2013
Penguin Group (USA)
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142180839

Summary
Devon, 1815. The charming Lord Nicholas Davenant and the beguiling Julia Percy should make a perfect match.

But before their love has a chance to grow, Nicholas is presumed dead in the Napoleonic war. Nick, however, is lost in time. Somehow he escaped certain death by leaping two hundred years forward to the present day where he finds himself in the care of a mysterious society, the Guild.

Questioning the limits of the impossible, Nick is desperate to find a way back to the life he left behind. Yet with the future of time itself hanging in the balance, could it be that the girl who first captured his heart has had the answers all along? Can Nick find a way to return to her? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Where—Amherst, Massachuesetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; Ph.D., Cornell University
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In her words
I was born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a parsonage made from three stuck-together old cottages. I attended Oberlin College. I worked for a year in features at Elle Magazine, then went to Cornell for a doctoral degree in English literature. After several years spent chasing research materials and true love around the UK, I settled down to teach American literature at Bryn Mawr College. I live with my partner in Philadelphia. The River of No Return is my first novel. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[A]n accomplished if sometimes slow-going literary mash-up. In the midst of battle, Lord Nicholas Falcott suddenly jumps 200 years into the future. Finding himself in 2003, Lord Nicholas forges a new life as “Nick Davenant."... Ridgway offers a well-crafted blend of science fiction, romance, mystery, and historical fiction, but stumbles with overlong explanations that, while helpful in untangling the story’s convolutions, stall the plot.
Publishers Weekly

A highly entertaining romp; [Ridgway’s] historical details are accurate, and the characters are believable. Fans of Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series should enjoy this time-traveling romantic adventure, which may also attract readers who like historical fiction with a twist.
Library Journal

In her stellar debut, Ridgeway manages the permutations of the time-travel trope with originality and aplomb. Lord Nick Falcott was an early nineteenth-century aristocrat, until he unexpectedly “jumped” into the twenty-first century while engaged in bloody battle.... [T]he entire premise and plot capture unwavering attention. Recommend this engaging, nuanced read to fans of A Discovery of Witches.... —Julie Trevelyan
Booklist

Literate time-travel exercise by English professor and debut novelist Ridgway.... [Nicholas Falcott is in] Napoleon’s dragoons one minute and recovering in a London hospital nearly two centuries later.... [He] goes with the flow anyway. Not much happens for all that, but Ridgway’s talky narrative is smart and often funny.... It’s not especially distinguished, but bookish fantasy fans who make it a point to keep up with Doctor Who will like this one
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Throughout the novel, Nick struggles to reconcile his knowledge of the future with the tide of the past. What do you think he finds to be the most difficult adjustment and why? What would be the greatest challenge for you, personally?

2. When do Nicholas Falcott and Nick Davenant seem to be the most similar? How much of Nick’s personality is determined by his location in time and space?

3. After learning that she is the talisman, Julia worries over the different meanings of the word and even fears for her life. Do you agree with the choice Ignatz made to keep her in the dark about her origin and her powers? In what sense of the word do you think Julia most embodies the talisman?

4. Nick’s return to his natural time affects his sisters in many ways, limiting certain freedoms while affording them power. What do you make of Clare’s idea for a model community and Arabella’s desire for education? Are these women trapped in their historical context? Or in what ways, if any, are they able to swim against the tide of history?

5. Time travelers harness emotions in order to travel up and down the river of time, and yet despair repels them. What implications does this have for human history, and why does Mr. Mibbs seem to be able to use despair to his advantage?

6. At the Guild compound in Chile, Nick becomes close friends with Meg and Leo. But when Meg and Leo grow suspicious of The Guild, they decide to leave Nick behind, reasoning that he is not ready, and leaving him to assume they are dead. What do you think motivated their decision to desert Nick? What would you have done in their position?

7. This novel presents many strong female characters, each of whom does what she can within her historical perspective. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of characters like Clare, Arabella, Alva, and Peter. As a time–traveler who has yet to travel in time, where do you think Julia fits within this spectrum? In what ways do you think she’ll continue to grow?

8. Throughout the novel, various characters rely on objects to keep them emotionally grounded, or even to stay rooted in time. What symbolic differences do you see between the Guild members’ rings, Nick’s acorn, and Julia’s box of trinkets and fairings?

9. At the end of the novel, Julia and Nick jump forward in time, and Nick sees a new version of the future. Castle Dar is standing, and so is the couple’s special oak tree. What else do you imagine is different, and what effect do you think Julia ultimately has on the past, present, or future?

10. How do you imagine Nick and Julia will resolve the problem of the encroaching Pale? Can you see the Ofan and The Guild working together to save the future?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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River of Smoke (Ibis Trilogy, 2)
Amitav Ghosh, 2011
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374174231

Summary
The Ibis, loaded to its gunwales with a cargo of indentured servants, is in the grip of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal; among the dozens flailing for survival are Neel, the pampered raja who has been convicted of embezzlement; Paulette, the French orphan masquerading as a deck-hand; and Deeti, the widowed poppy grower fleeing her homeland with her lover, Kalua.

The storm also threatens the clipper ship Anahita, groaning with the largest consignment of opium ever to leave India for Canton. And the Redruth, a nursery ship, carries Frederick “Fitcher” Penrose, a horticulturist determined to track down the priceless treasures of China that are hidden in plain sight: its plants that have the power to heal, or beautify, or intoxicate. All will converge in Canton’s Fanqui-town, or Foreign Enclave: a tumultuous world unto itself where civilizations clash and sometimes fuse. It is a powder keg awaiting a spark to ignite the Opium Wars.

Spectacular coincidences, startling reversals of fortune, and tender love stories abound. But this is much more than an irresistible page-turner. The blind quest for money, the primacy of the drug trade, the concealment of base impulses behind the rhetoric of freedom: in River of Smoke the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries converge, and the result is a consuming historical novel with powerful contemporary resonance. Critics praised Sea of Poppies for its vibrant storytelling, antic humor, and rich narrative scope; now Amitav Ghosh continues the epic that has charmed and compelled readers all over the globe. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1956
• Where—Kolkata, India
• Education—St. Stephen's College, Deli; Delhi University;
Ph.D., Oxford University.
• Awards—see below
• Currently—lives in New York City; Kolkata and Goa, India

Amitv Ghosh is the internationally bestselling author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Glass Palace, and is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes. Ghosh divides his time between Kolkata and Goa, India, and Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)

More
Ghosh was born in Kolkata (Calcutta) and was educated at The Doon School; St. Stephen's College, Delhi; Delhi University; and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology.

Ghosh lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Baker, author of the Laura Riding biography In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993) and a senior editor at Little, Brown and Company. They have two children, Lila and Nayan.

He has been a Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. In 1999, Ghosh joined the faculty at Queens College, City University of New York as Distinguished Professor in Comparative Literature. He has also been a visiting professor to the English department of Harvard University since 2005. Ghosh has recently purchased a property in Goa and is returning to India.

Sea of Poppies (2008), the first installment of a planned trilogy, is an epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. The second in the trilogy, River of Smoke was published in 2011.

His previous novels are The Circle of Reason (1986), The Shadow Lines (1990), In an Antique Land (1992), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma (1998), Countdown (1999), The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004). Ghosh's fiction is characterised by strong themes that may be somewhat identified with postcolonialism but could be labelled as historical novels. His topics are unique and personal; some of his appeal lies in his ability to weave "Indo-nostalgic" elements into more serious themes.

In addition to his novels, Ghosh has written The Imam and the Indian (2002), a large collection of essays on different themes such as fundamentalism, history of the novel, Egyptian culture, and literature).

In 2007, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government.

Amitav Ghosh's literary awards include:

• Prix Medicis Etranger (French; for Circle of Reason)
• Sahitya Akademic and Ananda Pursaskar Awards (Indian;
for The Shadow Lines)
• Arthur C. Clarke Award (UK; for The Calcutta Chromosome)
• Grand Prize-Fiction, Frankfurt International e-Book Awards
(for The Glass Palace)
• Hutch Crossword Book Prize (Indian; for The Hungry Tide)
• Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italian)
• Shortlisted for Man Booker (UK; for Sea of Poppies)
(Author bio from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
River of Smoke does not disappoint...[it] reclaims a story appropriated for too long by its winners...yet Ghosh does so without excessive earnestness, leavening his narrative with nuggets of fact and insight...[his] historical judgments are largely rendered subtly, without any of the sledgehammer effect of retrospective moralism that a lesser writer might have employed…With River of Smoke, Ghosh's Ibis trilogy is emerging as a monumental tribute to the pain and glory of an earlier era of globalization.
Shashi Tharoor - Washington Post

On one level, [River of Smoke] is a remarkable feat of research, bringing alive the hybrid customs of food and dress and the competing philosophies of the period with intimate precision; on another it is a subversive act of empathy, viewing a whole panorama of world history from the 'wrong' end of the telescope. The real trick, though, is that it is also fabulously entertaining.
Observer (UK)

Eloquent.... Fascinating.... [River of Smoke's] strength lies in how thoroughly Ghosh fills out his research with his novelistic fantasy, seduced by each new situation that presents itself and each new character, so that at their best the scenes read with a sensual freshness as if they were happening now.
Guardian (UK)

[This] vast book has a Dickensian sweep of characters, high- and low-life intermingling . . . Ghosh conjures up a thrilling sense of place.
Economist (UK)

Brillian.... By the book’s stormy and precarious ending, most readers will clutch it like the ship’s rail awaiting, just like Ghosh’s characters, the rest of the voyage to a destination unknown.
Don Oldenburg - USA Today

Ghosh’s best and most ambitious work ye.... [He] writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination.
New Yorker

Ghosh sets the second volume of his Ibis trilogy in 1838, appropriately enough, because at heart he's a 19th-century novelist with a sweeping vision of character and culture.... Ghosh triumphs both through the clarity of his style and the sweep of his vision, and he leaves the reader eager for volume three.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The opening scenes recount Deeti's survival after she and Kalua escaped the Ibis. She insists that destiny, not chance, led her to the site of her hidden shrine. For her, what does destiny mean? What legacies does she pass on to the next generation?

2. Like many of the novel's characters, Ah Fatt and Robin Chinnery have bicultural ancestries. What limitations and freedoms accompany their lack of a legitimate, aristocratic bloodline? Do ancestry and prestige go hand in hand in River of Smoke?

3. Discuss Bahram's and Fitcher's motivations. Are they simply greedy?

4. Paulette is a master of disguise and can comfortably move between cultures. What does she consider to be her true identity? Why is horticulture a suitable field for her?

5. Discuss the role of religion in shaping the characters' view of the world. How are the novel's Hindu characters affected by the expectations of the gods? When Christian characters justify the opium trade, how do they reconcile it with their faith? (You may enjoy revisiting Charles King's letter to Charles Elliot near the book's final pages.)

6. Bahram and Zadig discuss the experience of having an additional, foreign wife, debating whether love is a factor. How does the relationship between Bahram and Chi-mei change over the years? Would Bahram enjoy Canton as much if he weren't a foreigner?

7. How do the trilogy's ships—the formerly slave-trading Ibis, Fitcher's practical but eccentric-looking Redruth, and the treasure-laden Anahita (named for a Hindu goddess of water)—reflect their passengers?

8. In chapter seven, Robin's letter describes the Pearl River as a suburb of Canton. In chapter thirteen, Zadig recalls the legend that claims the river got its name from a foreign trader who dropped a mysterious pearl. Drawing on these and other impressions, discuss the Pearl River as a character: how would you describe its powers and its personality?

9. Consider Ghosh's penchant for intertwining fates. For example, Ah Fatt had been Neel's companion in the labor prison, while Neel (qualified to work as a munshi because of the education that accompanied his noble status) is close by when Mr. Punhyqua is arrested, marking the unlikely fall of another member of the ruling class. Does Ghosh create tragicomedy or pure irony in story lines such as these?

10. Near the end of chapter six, Bahram has a chance encounter with Napoleon (a scene inspired by reported encounters between the French emperor and seafaring traders). If you had been in Bahram's position, what would you have asked Napoleon?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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A River Runs Through It and Other Stories
Norman Maclean, 1976
University of Chicago Press
276 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616850425

Summary
This work will captivate readers with its vivid images of Montana's Big Blackfoot River, its tender yet realistic renderings of Maclean's father and trouble-prone brother, and its uncanny blending of fly fishing with the affections of the heart.

In this celebration of the river and the trout that inhabit it, Maclean writes of the river ritual that he shares with his brother Paul. They begin at sunrise and end hours later with cold beer, having fished their limit, since "to women who do not fish, men who come home without their limit are failures in life." As Paul tries to think like a fish, Maclean tries to think like Paul, wainting to find a way to offer help that Paul can accept but concluding, "you can love completely without completely understanding." (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 23, 1902
• Where—Clarinda, Iowa, USA
• Reared—Missoula, Montana
• Death—August 2, 1990
• Where—Chicago, Illinois
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth College; Ph.D., University of
Chicago
• Awards—National Book Critics Award, 1992

Norman Maclean grew up in the western Rocky Mountains in the early decades of the 20th century. He worked many summers in logging camps and for the U.S. Forest Service. This novella is based on his experiences of a young man who found that life was only a step from art in its structures and beauty. The beauty he found was in reality.

Maaclean was William Rainey Harper Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He died in 1990. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
On its surface, this beautiful memoir is about the intricacies of fly fishing and the two Montana brothers who fish the big western rivers. Fishing devotees will revel in descriptions of the rhythm, angles, whip and whistle of the perfect cast. We even get a bit of fish psychology: a trout knows it's being tricked if the fly isn't set perfectly on the water. (Read more..).
A LitLovers LitPick (May '07)

Altogether beautiful in the power of its feelings....As beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway.
Alfred Kazin - Chicago Tribune Book World

This is more than stunning fiction: It is a lyric record of a time and of a life, shining with Maclean's special gift for calling the reader's attention to arts of all kinds—the arts that work in nature, in personality, in social intercouse, in fly-fishing.
Kenneth M. Pierce - Village Voice

The title novella is the prize…Something unique and marvelous: a story that is at once an evocation of nature's miracles and realities and a probing of human mysteries. Wise, witty, wonderful, Maclean spins his tales, casts his flies, fishes the rivers and the woods for what he remembers from his youth in the Rockies.
Barbara Bannon - 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)

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Rivak's War
Marilyn Oser, 2013
Mill City Press
268 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781626520509

Summary
Russia, 1914. Rivka, daughter of a prosperous boot maker, seems destined by tradition for marriage and the humdrum rounds of shtetl life.

Then war breaks out, and things go badly for the tsar’s army. When demoralized troops begin deserting their posts in the trenches, one unlikely officer recruits a battalion of girls to set an example for the men.

Rivka seizes upon this chance for adventure as her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something great in the world. She signs on, never suspecting the terrors that await her, or the trials that will test her, or the mishaps that will take her from the frozen steppes of Siberia to the hot, dusty hills of Palestine.

Based on actual events, Rivka’s War is a riveting tale of loss and survival. In vivid detail, it portrays the impact of the Great War on Jewish life, re-creating a vanished world. (From the author.)

Author Bio
Marilyn Oser lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and on Long Island. A Ph.D. in language and literature, she has taught English and history and has raised funds for arts, environmental and community organizations. Author of the novel Playing for Keeps and the blog Streets of Israel, she is a recipient of the University of Michigan’s coveted Avery Hopwood Prize for excellence in writing. (From tha author .)

Book Reviews
A figure steps forward from history and shows herself to be a strong and courageous character. In Rivka's War, Marilyn Oser gives us a hero to cheer. A thoughtful and inspiring novel.
Susan Issacs

Outstanding....Five stars.
Fran Lewis, Just Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Many of the chapters in Rivka’s War are named for characters in the story. How does Rivka change and grow from her encounter with each of them? Which ones become role models for her?

2. One chapter is called “The Land.” How is the land also a kind of character that has its affect on Rivka?

3. Rivka wonders how she and Mischa have ended up on opposite sides of a political divide. How do you account for this?

4. Twice in Rivka's War, Rivka plunges into a deep depression. What are the factors that cause this? What factors help her overcome it?

5. Yashka is based on a historical figure. What attributes do you admire in her? What do you find less than admirable, even reprehensible?

6. Did biblical references in the novel enlarge your understanding of the events as they unfold?

7. Many horrifying scenes are portrayed in this novel, though these are mild compared to what actually occurred in Russia and Palestine during the war and its aftermath. Are such scenes appropriate in this novel? In any novel?

8. The story is based on events that happened a hundred years ago. What relevance does it have for our lives today?
(Questions provided courtesy of the author.)

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The Road
Cormac McCarthy, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
287 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307387899

Summary
Pulitizer Prize, 2007

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America.

Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark.

Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearting, a cart of scavenged food-and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love.

Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 20, 1933
• Where—Providence, Rhode Island, USA
• Education—University of Tennessee, US Air Force
• Awards— Ingram-Merrill Aware, 1959 and 1960; Faulkner
   Prize, 1965; Traveling Fellowship from American Academy
   of Arts and Letters, 1965; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1969;
   MacArthur Fellowship, 1981; National Book Award, 1992;
   National Book Critics Circle Award, 1992; James Tait Black
   Memorial Prize UK, 2006; Pulitzer Prize, 2007 for The Road.
• Currently—lives in Tesuque, New Mexico (Santa Fe area)

Cormac McCarthy (born Charles McCarthy) is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, ranging from the Southern Gothic, western, and post-apocalyptic genres. He has also written plays and screenplays.

He received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for The Road, and his 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. He received a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1992 novel, All the Pretty Horses.

His previous novel, Blood Meridian, (1985) was among Time Magazine's poll of the best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and he placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by the New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years.

Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth. In 2010 the London Times ranked The Road no.1 on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner.

Early years
McCarthy was born in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933, and moved with his family to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. He is the third of six children, with three sisters and two brothers. In Knoxville, he attended Knoxville Catholic High School. His father was a successful lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority from 1934 to 1967.

McCarthy entered the University of Tennessee in 1951-1952 and was a liberal arts major. In 1953, he joined the United States Air Force for four years, two of which he spent in Alaska, where he hosted a radio show. In 1957, he returned to the University of Tennessee. During this time in college, he published two stories in a student paper and won awards from the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1959 and 1960. In 1961, he and fellow university student Lee Holleman were married and had their son Cullen. He left school without earning a degree and moved with his family to Chicago where he wrote his first novel. He returned to Sevier County, Tennessee, and his marriage to Lee Holleman ended.

Writing
McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published by Random House in 1965. He decided to send the manuscript to Random House because "it was the only publisher [he] had heard of." At Random House, the manuscript found its way to Albert Erskine, who was William Faulkner's editor until Faulkner's death in 1962. Erskine continued to edit McCarthy for the next twenty years.

In the summer of 1965, using a Traveling Fellowship award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, McCarthy shipped out aboard the liner Sylvania, hoping to visit Ireland. While on the ship, he met Anne DeLisle, who was working on the ship as a singer. In 1966, they were married in England. Also in 1966, McCarthy received a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, which he used to travel around Southern Europe before landing in Ibiza, where he wrote his second novel, Outer Dark. Afterward he returned to America with his wife, and Outer Dark was published in 1968 to generally favorable reviews.

In 1969, McCarthy and his wife moved to Louisville, Tennessee, and purchased a barn, which McCarthy renovated, even doing the stonework himself. Here he wrote his next book, Child of God, based on actual events. Child of God was published in 1973. Like Outer Dark before it, Child of God was set in southern Appalachia. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Anne DeLisle and moved to El Paso, Texas. In 1979, his novel Suttree, which he had been writing on and off for twenty years, was finally published.

Supporting himself with the money from his 1981 MacArthur Fellowship, he wrote his next novel, Blood Meridian, which was published in 1985. The book has grown appreciably in stature in literary circles. In a 2006 poll of authors and publishers conducted by The New York Times Magazine to list the greatest American novels of the previous quarter-century, Blood Meridian placed third, behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved and Don DeLillo's Underworld.

McCarthy finally received widespread recognition in 1992 with the publication of All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, completing a Western trilogy. In the midst of this trilogy came The Stonemason, McCarthy's second dramatic work. He had previously written a film for PBS in the 1970s, The Gardener's Son.

McCarthy's next book, 2005's No Country for Old Men, stayed with the western setting and themes, yet moved to a more contemporary period. It was adapted into a film of the same name by the Coen Brothers, winning four Academy Awards and more than 75 film awards globally. McCarthy's latest book, The Road, was published in 2006 and won international acclaim and the Pulitzer Prize for literature. A film adaptation starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee was released on November 25, 2009. Also in 2006, McCarthy published a play entitled The Sunset Limited.

Extras
• According to Wired magazine in December, 2009, McCarthy's Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter was put up for auction at Christie's. The Olivetti Lettera 32 has been in his care for 46 years, since 1963. He picked up the used machine for $50 from a pawn shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. McCarthy reckons he has typed around five million words on the machine, and maintenance consisted of “blowing out the dust with a service station hose”. The typewriter was auctioned on Friday, December 4 and the auction house, Christie’s, estimated it would fetch between $15,000 and $20,000; it sold for $254,500. The Olivetti’s replacement for McCarthy to use is another Olivetti, bought by McCarthy’s friend John Miller for $11. The proceeds of the auction are to be donated to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization.

• McCarthy now lives in the Tesuque, New Mexico, area, north of Santa Fe, with his wife, Jennifer Winkley, and their son, John. He guards his privacy. In one of his few interviews (with The New York Times), McCarthy reveals that he is not a fan of authors who do not "deal with issues of life and death," citing Henry James and Marcel Proust as examples. "I don't understand them," he said. "To me, that's not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange." McCarthy remains active in the academic community of Santa Fe and spends much of his time at the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by his friend, physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

• Talk show host Oprah Winfrey chose McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road as the April 2007 selection for her Book Club. As a result, McCarthy agreed to his first television interview, which aired on The Oprah Winfrey Show on June 5, 2007. The interview took place in the library of the Santa Fe Institute; McCarthy told Winfrey that he does not know any writers and much prefers the company of scientists.

• During the interview he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he has endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road. Cormac noted to Oprah that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "block the page up with weird little marks." (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
This is an exquisitely bleak incantation — pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was never meant to see.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

The Road is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy's signature, but this time in restrained doses—short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a few lines long…the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of the posthumous condition of nature and civilization—"the frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night."
William Kennedy - The New York Times Book Review

In Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, the bloodbath is finally complete. The violence that animated his great Western novels has been superseded by a flash of nuclear annihilation, which also blasts away some of what we expect from the reclusive author's work. With this apocalyptic tale, McCarthy has moved into the allegorical realm of Samuel Beckett and José Saramago — and, weirdly, George Romero [Night of the Living Dead].
Ron Charles - The Washington Post

(Audio version.) McCarthy's latest novel, a frightening apocalyptic vision, is narrated by a nameless man, one of the few survivors of an unspecified civilization-ending catastrophe. He and his young son are trekking along a treacherous highway, starving and freezing, trying to avoid roving cannibal armies. The tale, and their lives, are saved from teetering over the edge of bleakness thanks to the man's fierce belief that they are "the good guys" who are preserving the light of humanity. In this stark, effective production, Stechschulte gives the father an appropriately harsh, weary voice that sways little from its numbed register except to urge on the weakening boy or soothe his fears after an encounter with barbarians. When they uncover some vestige of the former world, the man recalls its vanished wonder with an aching nostalgia that makes the listener's heart swell. Stechschulte portrays the son with a mournful, slightly breathy tone that emphasizes the child's whininess, making him much less sympathetic than his resourceful father. With no music or effects interrupting Stechschulte's carefully measured pace and gruff, straightforward delivery, McCarthy's darkly poetic prose comes alive in a way that will transfix listeners.
Publishers Weekly

Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses) here offers a prescient account of a man and his son trying to survive in a devastated country where food is scarce and everyone has become a scavenger. The term survival of the fittest rings true here—very few people remain, and friends are extinct. Essentially, this is a story about nature vs. nurture, commitment and promises, and though there aren't many characters, there is abundant life in the prose. We are reminded how McCarthy has mastered the world outside of our domestic and social circles, with each description reading as if he had pulled a scene from the landscape and pasted it in the book. He uses metaphors the way some writers use punctuation, sprinkling them about with an artist's eye, showing us that literature from the heart still exists. Recommended for all libraries. —Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH
Library Journal

Even within the author's extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread. McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like [George Romero's camp film] Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy's fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father "Papa"). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the "good guys," carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are "bad guys," cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel's moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that's good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they'd never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy's recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry. A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Introduction: Set in the smoking ashes of a postapocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy's The Road tells the story of a man and his son's journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched countryside and blasted cities "held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell" [p. 181]. It is a starved world, all plant and animal life dead or dying, some of the few human survivors even eating each other alive.

The father and son move through the ruins searching for food and shelter, trying to keep safe from murderous, roving bands. They have only a pistol to defend themselves, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

1. Cormac McCarthy has an unmistakable prose style. What do you see as the most distinctive features of that style? How is the writing in The Road in some ways more like poetry than narrative prose?

2. Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of "the man" and "the boy" affect the way in which readers relate to them?

3. How is McCarthy able to make the postapocalyptic world of The Road seem so real and utterly terrifying? Which descriptive passages are especially vivid and visceral in their depiction of this blasted landscape? What do you find to be the most horrifying features of this world and the survivors who inhabit it?

4. McCarthy doesn't make explicit what kind of catastrophe has ruined the earth and destroyed human civilization, but what might be suggested by the many descriptions of a scorched landscape covered in ash? What is implied by the father's statement that "On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world" [p. 32]?

5. As the father is dying, he tells his son he must go on in order to "carry the fire." When the boy asks if the fire is real, the father says, "It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it" [p. 279]. What is this fire? Why is it so crucial that they not let it die?

6. McCarthy envisions a postapocalyptic world in which "murder was everywhere upon the land" and the earth would soon be "largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes" [p. 181]. How difficult or easy is it to imagine McCarthy's nightmare vision actually happening? Do you think people would likely behave as they do in the novel, under the same circumstances? Does it now seem that human civilization is headed toward such an end?

7. The man and the boy think of themselves as the "good guys." In what ways are they like and unlike the "bad guys" they encounter? What do you think McCarthy is suggesting in the scenes in which the boy begs his father to be merciful to the strangers they encounter on the road? How is the boy able to retain his compassion—to be, as one reviewer put it, "compassion incarnate"?

8. The sardonic blind man named Ely who the man and boy encounter on the road tells the father that "There is no God and we are his prophets" [p. 170]. What does he mean by this? Why does the father say about his son, later in the same conversation, "What if I said that he's a god?" [p. 172] Are we meant to see the son as a savior?

9. The Road takes the form of a classic journey story, a form that dates back to Homer's Odyssey. To what destination are the man and the boy journeying? In what sense are they "pilgrims"? What, if any, is the symbolic significance of their journey?

10. McCarthy's work often dramatizes the opposition between good and evil, with evil sometimes emerging triumphant. What does The Road ultimately suggest about good and evil? Which force seems to have greater power in the novel?

11. What makes the relationship between the boy and his father so powerful and poignant? What do they feel for each other? How do they maintain their affection for and faith in each other in such brutal conditions?

12. Why do you think McCarthy ends the novel with the image of trout in mountain streams before the end of the world: "In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery" [p. 287]. What is surprising about this ending? Does it provide closure, or does it prompt a rethinking of all that has come before? What does it suggest about what lies ahead?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Road Home
Rose Tremain, 2007
Little, Brown & Co.
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316002622

Summary
In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev makes his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has already lost his family.

Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys—he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains, he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker, and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious friend Rudi, who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.

Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country—but can he really go home again?

Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in The Road Home, and her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Sorbonne, Paris; B.A., University of East Anglia
• Awards—James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Prix Fémina
Etranger, Whitbread Award, Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in East Anglia, UK

Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson in 1943 in London, the daughter of Viola (known as Jane) and Keith Thomson, a playwright.

She went to boarding school at Crofton Grange in Hertfordshire, an experience of which she later said in a Guardian interview, "It had all the horrors of boarding school— it was very cold and the food was disgusting. But the good thing about being sent away to school is that there’s a lot of what I would call dead time. You had to really use your own resources and what some of us did was to write our own plays and put them on. We starred in them, made the costumes, made the scenery, and it was thrilling."

After school she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then graduated with a degree in English from the University of East Anglia, where she later taught creative writing from 1988-1995.

She married Jon Tremain in 1971 and in 1972 had a daughter, Eleanor. Her second marriage was to the theatre director Jonathan Dudley. She now lives in East Anglia with the writer and biographer Richard Holmes.

Her first novel, Sadler’s Birthday, was published in 1976, and picked up by the editor Penelope Hoare, who later said, "I remember feeling utterly thrilled when I read it.... It was so unlike most people’s first novels, in the sense that it didn’t seem to be in the least bit autobiographical." Hoare has been Tremain’s editor ever since, working together on ten novels and several short story collections.

In the course of her writing career, Tremain has garnered a host of prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and the prestigious Prix Fémina Etranger, the Whitbread Novel Award, and several others. She has been nominated for the Booker and Orange Prize several times. She won the Orange Prize in 2008 for The Road Home. (Author bio from Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House, UK.)

Book Reviews
Journeys like Lev's are very much a part of Britain's present reality, with discussion of the Eastern European invasion appearing all over. But Tremain elevates the subject beyond its outlines by making Lev not a statistic or a caricature or the standard-bearer of a trend but simply a man—fully embodied, his ignoble and noble acts presented without exaggeration, without excessive praise or condemnation.... A less disciplined and agile author might have been tempted to ease Lev's transition from daydreamer to doer. Or she might have jollied Lev into a toque at London's River Cafe and set Rudi up as a chauffeur on Belisha Road. But Rose Tremain is in the business of inventing not so much fantasies as alternate realities.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times

Rose Tremain brings the full tone and range of her novelist's imagination to bear on Lev, giving him, besides his enduring and endearing grief, humour, a romantic temperament, a genius for intimate male friendship and a poets' eye for images.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)

A classic work by the gifted Tremain.... She has the art of finding the improbable graces in human connection.
Guardian (UK)

This is a finely balanced novel of urgent humanity.... The Road Home should keep you gripped...and fraught with anxious sympathy.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)

The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forester famously exhorted.
Stacey D'Erasmo - Los Angeles Times

It's not difficult to see why author Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize—a prestigious British fiction award--for her latest novel, The Road Home. From page one, Tremain plunges readers deep into the journey of Lev, an immigrant from an unnamed Eastern European country.... An unexpected, poignant story.
Allecia Vermillion - Chicago Sun Times

Tremain transforms this episodic road story into a gem of a novel, driven by a memorable character whose caring and ambition move him from a difficult personal situation and damaging historical past toward a positive new life.
Robert Allen Papinchak - Seattle Times

Why do I love Rose Tremain? It's not just the clarity of her prose, the liveliness of her plots, the precision of her settings, or the depth of her characters. I love Tremain because she is so compassionate. Her novels exemplify this moral quality, even as they excel at all the others.
Susan Balee - Philadelphia Inquirer

Tremain's protagonists are often faced with trials that have a fabled quality...and her latest novel is no exception...At once timeless and bitingly contemporary, this novel explores the life now lived by millions—when one's hope lies in one country and one's heart in another.
The New Yorker

Tremain (Restoration) turns in a low-key but emotionally potent look at the melancholia of migration for her 14th book. Olev, a 42-year-old widower from an unnamed former east bloc republic, is taking a bus to London, where he imagines every man resembles Alec Guinness and hard work will be rewarded by wealth. He has left behind a sad young daughter, a stubborn mother and the newly shuttered sawmill where he had worked for years. His landing is harsh: the British are unpleasant, immigrants are unwelcome, and he's often overwhelmed by homesickness. But Lev personifies Tremain's remarkable ability to craft characters whose essential goodness shines through tough, drab circumstances. Among them are Lydia, the fellow expatriate; Christy, Lev's alcoholic Irish landlord who misses his own daughter; and even the cruelly demanding Gregory, chef-proprietor of the posh restaurant where Lev first finds work. A contrived but still satisfying ending marks this adroit emigre's look at London.
Publishers Weekly

A displaced European's Candide-like progress through contemporary London is charted in this ambitious novel from the Whitbread Award-winning British author (The Colour, 2003, etc.). The protagonist is Lev, a recently widowed and also jobless former sawmill worker. He has left his young daughter and his (also widowed) mother behind (in a generically economically disadvantaged country that is and isn't Poland), hoping to find work and send money home. Debarking from the Trans-Euro bus on which he meets a similarly down-at-heels countrywoman (Lydia, who'll re-enter Lev's new life at variously crucial moments), Lev acquires a fragile living working as a distributor of leaflets, as a dishwasher, and so on, slowly ascending the ladder of minimal solvency, making a painstaking adaptation to a society that seems, to his bemused view, inexplicably self-indulgent, pampered and unmotivated. While sticking close to Lev's roiling thought processes, Tremain simultaneously constructs a subtly detailed mosaic of personal and cultural distinctions and conflicts-notably in Lev's cautious approach to reclaiming a sex life (perhaps even a love life?) and in generously developed conversations between Lev and his fulsome Irish landlord, bibulous plumber and compulsive worrywart Christy Slane. The novel's texture is further enriched by lengthy flashbacks spun from Lev's wistful memories, which acquaint us more fully with his warmhearted late wife Marina and his best friend Rudi, a resourceful hustler whose busy head is filled with visions of all things American, and foolproof scams by which such riches may be acquired. Rudi is an ingenious comic counterpart to Candide's annoyingly optimistic mentor Pangloss, and the novel dances into vigorous life whenever he takes hold of it. Still, Lev offers readers ample reason to get lost in this immensely likable novel's many pleasures. One of the best from the versatile Tremain, who keeps on challenging herself, and rewarding readers.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. "Through Lev’s eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success." (Edward Marriott, Observer)

Do you agree with Marriot’s assessment of how Lev views London, and do you feel Tremain paints a realistic picture?

2. In her author interview Rose Tremain says "I've deliberately built my fictions around characters who are distant from me, in gender, place or time—or all of these. The moment I get close to my own biography, I feel boredom (and even mild self-dislike) creeping up on me."

Does this reflect your own feelings as a reader? Do you prefer novels which reflect your own experiences or take you somewhere else? What do you think you have in common with Lev?

3. Food is a very important motif in the novel. How does Tremain illustrate Lev’s journey in terms of food? Why do you think she only begins to describe the food of his own country towards the end?

4. In the author interview Tremain says that in her view, "most Brits want to be welcoming to migrants, but have worries—or indeed extreme anxieties—of their own which sometimes prevent them from doing this."

Do you believe that is true in your country? What worries and anxieties do you think Tremain is referring to and how are these played out in the novel?

5. Have you ever lived in another country? If so, how far did your experiences reflect Lev’s? What did you find challenging about establishing a new life in a different culture? Did it affect the way you read the novel? If not, do you think you could ever do what Lev did? What would you find hardest to leave behind?

6. Lev’s relationship with Sophie becomes very dark when he turns violent towards her. Why do you think he has such difficult relationships with women?

7. In the end Lev returns to his family and builds a life with his new found skills and money. Why do you think that the novel has ended in such an idealistic way? Do you think that this ending is possible for immigrants?
(Questions issued by Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House, UK.)

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The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain
Bill Bryson, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385539289

Summary
The hilarious and loving sequel to a hilarious and loving classic of travel writing: Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson’s valentine to his adopted country of England

In 1995 Bill Bryson got into his car and took a weeks-long farewell motoring trip about England before moving his family back to the United States. The book about that trip, Notes from a Small Island, is uproarious and endlessly endearing, one of the most acute and affectionate portrayals of England in all its glorious eccentricity ever written.

Two decades later, Bryson sets out again to rediscover that country, and the result is The Road to Little Dribbling. Nothing is funnier than Bill Bryson on the road—prepare for the total joy and multiple episodes of unseemly laughter. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 8 1951
• Where—Des Moines, Iowa, USA
• Education—B.A., Drake University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, England, UK

William McGuire "Bill" Bryson is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science. Born an American, he was a resident of North Yorkshire, UK, for most of his professional life before moving back to the US in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to the UK, living in Norfolk, and was appointed Chancellor of Durham University.

Early years
Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of William and Mary Bryson. He has an older brother, Michael, and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.

He was educated at Drake University but dropped out in 1972, deciding to instead backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz (who later appears in Bryson's A Walk in the Woods). Some of Bryson's experiences from this European trip are included as flashbacks in a book about a similar excursion written 20 years later, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.

Staying in the UK, Bryson landed a job working in a psychiatric hospital—the now defunct Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water in Surrey. There he met his wife Cynthia, a nurse. After marring, the couple moved to the US, in 1975, so Bryson could complete his college degree. In 1977 they moved back to the UK where they remained until 1995.

Living in North Yorkshire and working primarily as a journalist, Bryson eventually became chief copy editor of the business section of The Times, and then deputy national news editor of the business section of The Independent.

He left journalism in 1987, three years after the birth of his third child. Still living in Kirkby Malham, North Yorkshire, Bryson started writing independently, and in 1990 their fourth and final child, Sam, was born.

Books
Bryson came to prominence in the UK with his 1995 publication of Notes from a Small Island, an exploration of Britain. Eight years later, as part of the 2003 World Book Day, Notes was voted by UK readers as the best summing up of British identity and the state of the nation. (The same year, 2003, saw Bryson appointed a Commissioner for English Heritage.)

In 1995, Bryson and his family returned to the US, living in Hanover, New Hampshire for the next eight years. His time there is recounted in the 1999 story collection, I'm A Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to American After 20 Years Away (known as Notes from a Big Country in the UK, Canada and Australia).

It was during this time that Bryson decided to walk the Appalachian Trail with his friend Stephen Katz. The resulting book is the 1998 A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The book became one of Bryson's all-time bestsellers and was adapted to film in 2015, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.

In 2003, the Brysons and their four children returned to the UK. They now live in Norfolk.

That same year, Bryson published A Short History of Nearly Everything, a 500-page exploration, in nonscientific terms, of the history of some of our scientific knowledge. The book reveals the often humble, even humorous, beginnings of some of the discoveries which we now take for granted.

The book won Bryson the prestigious 2004 Aventis Prize for best general science book and the 2005 EU Descartes Prize for science communication. Although one scientist is alleged to have jokingly described A Brief History as "annoyingly free of mistakes," Bryson himself makes no such claim, and a list of nine reported errors in the book is available online.

Bryson has also written two popular works on the history of the English language—Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way (1990) and Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States (1994). He also updated of his 1983 guide to usage, Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. These books were popularly acclaimed and well-reviewed, despite occasional criticism of factual errors, urban myths, and folk etymologies.

In 2016, Bryson published The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in England, a sequel to his Notes from a Small Island.

Honors
In 2005, Bryson was appointed Chancellor of Durham University, succeeding the late Sir Peter Ustinov, and has been particularly active with student activities, even appearing in a Durham student film (the sequel to The Assassinator) and promoting litter picks in the city. He had praised Durham as "a perfect little city" in Notes from a Small Island. He has also been awarded honorary degrees by numerous universities, including Bournemouth University and in April 2002 the Open University.

In 2006, Frank Cownie, the mayor of Des Moines, awarded Bryson the key to the city and announced that 21 October 2006 would be known as "Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid, Day."

In November 2006, Bryson interviewed the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair on the state of science and education.

On 13 December 2006, Bryson was awarded an honorary OBE for his contribution to literature. The following year, he was awarded the James Joyce Award of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin.

In January 2007, Bryson was the Schwartz Visiting Fellow of the Pomfret School in Connecticut.

In May 2007, he became the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. His first area focus in this role was the establishment of an anti-littering campaign across England. He discussed the future of the countryside with Richard Mabey, Sue Clifford, Nicholas Crane and Richard Girling at CPRE's Volunteer Conference in November 2007. (From Wikipedia. Adapted 2/1/2016.)

Book Reviews
Although he's now entering what he fondly calls his "dotage"…Bryson seems merely to have sharpened both his charms and his crotchets…. [H]e remains devoted to Britain's eccentric place names as well as its eccentric pastimes…. He's still apt to seek out the obscure.
Alida Becker - New York Times Book Review

Bryson’s capacity for wonder at the beauty of his adopted homeland seems to have only grown with time.... Britain is still his home four decades later, a period in which he went from lowly scribe at small-town British papers to best-selling travel writer. But he retains an outsider’s appreciation for a country that first struck him as "wholly strange...and yet somehow marvelous."
Griff Witte - Washington Post

[Y]ou could hardly ask for a better guide to Great Britain than Bill Bryson. Bryson’s new book is in most ways a worthy successor and sequel to his classic Notes From A Small Island. Like its predecessor, The Road to Little Dribbling is a travel memoir, combining adventures and observations from his travels around the island nation with recounting of his life there, off and mostly on, over the last four decades. Bryson is such a good writer that even if you don’t especially go in for travel books, he makes reading this book worthwhile.
Nancy Klingener - Miami Herald

Fans should expect to chuckle, snort, snigger, grunt, laugh out loud and shake with recognition…a clotted cream and homemade jam scone of a treat.
Sunday Times (UK)

At its best as the history of a love affair, the very special relationship between Bryson and Britain. We remain lucky to have him.
Matthew Engel - Financial Times (UK)

We have a tradition in this country of literary teddy bears—John Betjeman and Alan Bennett among them—whose cutting critiques of the absurdities and hypocrisies of the British people are carried out with such wit and good humour that they become national treasures. Bill Bryson is American but is now firmly established in the British teddy bear pantheon.... The fact that this wonderful writer can unerringly catalogue all our faults and is still happy to put up with us should make every British reader’s chest swell with pride.
Jake Kerridge - Sunday Express (UK)

There were moments when I snorted out loud with laughter while reading this book in public... He can be as gloriously silly as ever.
London Times

Everybody loves Bill Bryson, don’t they? He’s clever, witty, entertaining, a great companion... his research is on show here, producing insight, wisdom and startling nuggets of information... Bill Bryson and his new book are the dog’s bollocks.
Independent on Sunday (UK)

Stuffed with eye-opening facts and statistics.... Bryson's charm and wit continue to float off the page....Recognising oneself is part of the pleasure of reading Bryson's mostly affable rants about Britain and Britishness.
Daily Mail (UK)

We go to him less for insights—though there are plenty of these—and more for the pleasure of his company. And he can be very funny indeed. Almost every page has a line worth quoting.
Glasgow Herald

At last, Bill Bryson has got back to what he does best—penning travel books that educate, inform and will have you laughing out loud... I was chuckling away by page four and soaking up his historic facts to impress my mates with. Sure to be a bestseller.
Sun (UK)

Bryson has no equal. He combines the charm and humour of Michael Palin with the cantankerousness of Victor Meldrew and the result is a benign intolerance that makes for a gloriously funny read.
Daily Express (UK)

As usual, [Bryson] scatters an entertaining mix of wacky anecdotes and factoids.... His wry observations and self-deprecating humor keep him from coming off as a bitter cynic, and his lyrical way with words keeps the pages turning.
Publishers Weekly

Bryson complements his expansive repertoire with a revisit of Great Britain, reflecting on his experiences over the past several decades as a British immigrant as he travels "The Bryson Line" from southern England to the northernmost point of Scotland.... Britain and all its quirks. —Lacy S. Wolfe, Ouachita Baptist Univ. Lib. Arkadelphia, AR
Library Journal

(Starred review.) This being Bryson, one chuckles every couple of pages, of course, saying, "yup, that sounds about right."... He clearly adores his adopted country. There are no better views, finer hikes, more glorious castles, or statelier grounds than the ones he finds, and Bryson takes readers on a lark of a walk across this small island with megamagnetism.
Booklist

[A]nother fascinating cross-country jaunt [with Bryson].... No words are minced or punches pulled where he finds social decline.... However, the majority of his criticisms bear his signature wit, and the bulk of his love/hate relationship with Britain falls squarely on the love side.... [E]ntertaining and educational.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for The Road to Little Dribbling—then take it from there...

1. In his 1995 Notes from a Small Island, Bryson referred to what he saw as a consideration for others that permeated British communal life. Now, in The Road to Little Dribbling, he sees the absence of consideration:

The Britain I came to [in 1977] was predicated on the idea of doing the right thing most of the time whether anyone knew you were doing it or not.... You might not leave a tip...but you wouldn't pretend to leave a decent tip and then stick in a small coin.

Talk about the above observation. Is Bryson correct? Is what he sees as Britain's current self-absorption endemic to other countries? Is it true for all age groups, or is it more prevalent in young people (thus it is always so)? Perhaps you disagree with him altogether.

2. The overriding theme of Bryson's book might be put this way: "in countless small ways the world around us grows gradually [lousier]." Is Bryson simply a cantankerous older man, who uses his fame and prestige to take umbrage at whatever annoys him? Or has he earned the right to be genuinely concerned about what he perceives as England's decline, its carelessness, and its misplaced values?

3. Bryson weaves a substantial amount of research with numerous facts into his tale. For instance, 600,000 riders populate the London Underground at any one time, "making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo." What other tidbits of information surprised you, made you think, or even laugh out loud? Consider his stops at Sutton Hoo where he contemplates Britain's long ago past; New Forest where he considers Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualism; or Oxford where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile. Was all this of interest to you...or did it drag down the book's pace?

4. Bryson lists very specific reasons for continuing to live in England. Talk about his list...and make your own list, if not for Britain, than for the place you do live.

5. Do you find Bill Bryson funny? What are some of the funniest parts of his book? Where is the humor (perhaps) strained?

6. Have you read other Bill Bryson works, specifically his 1995 Notes on a Small Island, the prequel to this book, or A Walk in the Woods (1998) an account of his trek along America's Appalachian Trail? If so, how does this book compare to either of those?

(Questions by LitLovers. Feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Roanoke Girls
Amy Engle, 2017
Crown/Archetype
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101906668

Summary
Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.

After her mother's suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas.

Lane knew little of her mother's mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran…fast and far away.

Eleven years later, Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run too? Or something worse?

Unable to resist his pleas, Lane returns to help search, and to ease her guilt at having left Allegra behind. Her homecoming may mean a second chance with the boyfriend whose heart she broke that long ago summer. But it also means facing the devastating secret that made her flee, one she may not be strong enough to run from again.

As it weaves between Lane’s first Roanoke summer and her return, The Roanoke Girls shocks and tantalizes, twisting its way through revelation after mesmerizing revelation, exploring the secrets families keep and the fierce and terrible love that both binds them together and rips them apart. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Kansas
• Raised—Iran; Taiwan; Kansas City, Missouri, USA
• Education—University of Kansas; J.D. Georgetown University
• Currently—lives near Kansas City, Missouri

Amy Engle is best known as a young adult writer, but in 2017 she made her first foray into adult books with the gothic thriller The Roanoke Girls.

Born in Kansas, Amy's family moved to Iran when she was three. After her parents' divorced, she returned to the States, to Kansas City, Missouri. When her mother remarried, she moved with her mother and stepfather to Taiwan. The family eventually returned to Kansas City, Missouri, where Amy graduated from high school. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Kansas and then headed to Washington, D.C., where she earned a law degree from Georgetown University.

With her law degree in hand, Amy returned to Kansas City. During the next 10 years, she worked as a criminal defense attorney, married a another attorney, and started a family. Once her children were born, Amy decided to leave law and stay at home. However, she set a 10-year goal for herself: to write and publish a book.

The results of her efforts, after some procrastination and a false start or two, were her popular 2014 The Book of Ivy, and its sequel, The Revolution of Ivy, in 2015. Both are young adult novels. Between the two Ivy novels, Amy began work on her first adult novel, which became The Roanoke Girls, released in 2017. Amy said she enjoyed "exploring the shadowy side of the human experience." (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
With more twists than a bag of pretzels, this compelling family saga may make you question what you think you know about your own relatives.
Cosmopolitan

A page-turning thriller that will allow you to escape into another world…filled with family secrets and a legacy of death and disappearance for the infamous “Roanoke Girls” — a privileged Kansas matriarchy with more than its fair share of tragic drama.
Bustle

A crime must-read to devour.… The Roanoke Girls has nothing to do with Virginia but everything to do with missing girls, as the females in the Roanoke family, who live in a tiny town in rural Kansas not worth naming, are rich, beautiful, and generally short-lived…The farmhouse, which is "equal parts horrifying and mesmerizing," is a perfect setting for a gothic mystery full of small-town secrets, lies, and guilt.
Literary Hub

Engel drops a wicked twist in the first 35 pages—in the middle of a paragraph on the middle of the page—and lets it sit like a coiled snake…from that point on, The Roanoke Girls becomes a thrilling mystery and a satisfyingly gothic portrait of Middle America…a dark fable of trauma and acceptance about damaged people accepting their crooked parts and using them to move forward.
Bookpage

Engel hits a homerun with this “gothic suspense novel” that tells the story of the Roanoke family, a prominent and very private Kansas family…a rollercoaster ride through a dark family history and the one devastating family secret.
Pulse Magazine

[A] gripping if creepy thriller set on the Kansas prairie.… Skipping lightly between past and present…this gothic page-turner speeds inexorably toward the kinds of devastating revelations readers won’t soon forget.
Publishers Weekly

[D]ark family secrets…bring the ugly past to light. Engel… memorable cast of characters and a twisting, tangled plot that attracts readers from the first page.… [An] atmospheric and unsettling tale of the secrets and bonds of family. —Amy Hoseth, Colorado State Univ. Lib., Fort Collins
Library Journal

An emotionally captivating story.
Booklist

Whole lotta dead girls in this rural Kansas family.… In her acknowledgments, the author thanks her grandparents for showing her the joys of small-town life, but, unfortunately, the book traffics in the most vicious stereotypes.… Sordid, unrealistic, and unredeemed.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.)

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
Are they plausible or implausible?
Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

Is the conclusion probable or believable?
Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
Perhaps it's too predictable.
Can you envision a different or better ending?

Rodham: A Novel
Curtis Sittenfeld, 2020
Random House
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399590917

Summary
From the author of American Wife and Eligible … He proposed. She said no. And it changed her life forever.

In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement.

And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.

In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.

But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas.

Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life.

Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times.

In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 23, 1975
• Where—Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in St. Louis, Missouri

Elizabeth Curtis Sittenfeld is an American writer, the author of several novels and a collection of short stories.

Sittenfeld was the second of four children (three girls and a boy) of Paul G. Sittenfeld, an investment adviser, and Elizabeth (Curtis) Sittenfeld, an art history teacher and librarian at Seven Hills School, a private school in Cincinnati.

She attended Seven Hills School through the eighth grade, then attended high school at Groton School, a boarding school in Groton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1993. In 1992, the summer before her senior year, she won Seventeen magazine's fiction contest.

She attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, before transferring to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. At Stanford, she studied Creative Writing, wrote articles for the college newspaper, and edited that paper's weekly arts magazine. At the time, she was also chosen as one of Glamour magazine's College Women of the Year. She earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Novels
• Prep
Her first novel Prep (2005) deals with coming of age, self-identity, and class distinctions in the preppy and competitive atmosphere of a private school.

• The Man of My Dreams
Sittenfeld's second novel, The Man of My Dreams (2006), follows a girl named Hannah from the end of her 8th grade year through her college years at Tufts and into her late twenties.

• American Wife
Sittenfeld's third novel, American Wife (2008), is the tale of Alice Blackwell, a fictional character who shares many similarities with former First Lady Laura Bush.

• Sisterland
Her fourth novel, Sisterland (2013), concerns a set of identical twins who have psychic powers, one of whom hides her strange gift while the other has become a professional psychic.

• Eligible
A 21st-century retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Eligible was released in 2016. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/12/2013.)

Book Reviews
[I]ntelligent and respectful and well made but bland…. Rodham never has a thought, in this novel, that stabs you or comes from anywhere close to left field. As if it were the Great Salt Lake, you won’t sink in this book—but it won’t quench your thirst, either…. The best thing about reading Rodham, while living through our government’s response to the coronavirus, is that it allows us to do something some of us were doing already, which is to recall her competence and empathy and to miss her enormously.
Dwight Garner - New York Times

[R]eadable and psychologically acute…. Ms. Sittenfeld is at her best in depicting the bizarre freak show into which presidential elections have devolved…. Ms. Sittenfeld’s one misstep in this hugely enjoyable book was in turning Bill Clinton into a comic-book villain…. Caught up in the novel, I was almost surprised to remember… that these two forged a partnership that has endured in spite of everything— [which] is more interesting than Ms. Sittenfeld’s simplistic good feminist/bad sexist dichotomy.
Brooke Allen - Wall Street Journal

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham descends like an avenging angel… a high-profile novel—not a parody or a joke book, but a serious work of literary fiction…. While telling a compelling story, Rodham provides an insightful analysis of the function of sexism in our political discourse…. Sittenfeld is at her wittiest when re-creating the men who dominate modern American politics… captures Trump better than any other novel has so far… It’s an astounding, slaying parody.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

Smart, engaging, and heartbreakingly plausible…. Hillary always was a policy wonk, and Sittenfeld evokes her smart, detailed voice for good and ill…. In the longing and loneliness, the anger as well as ambition, this Hillary makes Rodham a compelling portrait of a future that might have been.
Clea Simon - Boston Globe

In this entertaining political fantasy, Sittenfeld… begins with an intimate perspective on historical events… [and] movingly captures Hillary’s awareness of her transformation into a complicated public figure…. [An] often funny, mostly sympathetic, and always sharp what-if.
Publishers Weekly

[A] fascinating premise…. Successfully interspersing fact with fiction, Sittenfeld imagines Rodham's personal and professional life without marriage in aching detail in this captivating novel. —Melissa DeWild, Comstock Park, MI
Library Journal

Daring, seductive, and provocative… [an] exhilaratingly trenchant, funny, and affecting tale…. Sittenfeld orchestrates a gloriously cathartic antidote to the actual struggles women presidential candidates face in a caustically divided America.
Booklist

Sittenfeld… [creates] an interior world for a woman everyone thinks they know. This Hillary tracks with the real person who’s been living in public all these years, and it’s enjoyable to hear her think about her own desires, her strengths and weaknesses.
Kirkus Reviews

Rodham is a provocative, bitingly funny re-imagining of what a woman’s life could be if she didn’t need to compromise her own ambitions in support of her partner’s. Sittenfeld has written a nuanced, astute portrait of one of modern history’s most contentious figures, and never shies away from either the thornier aspects of her character, or those of our society.
Refinery29

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for RODHAM ... and then take off on your own:

1. How does this book portray the Hillary we know from her long years in the public's eye? Is the portrayal credible? Is the Hillary Rodham in this novel the same woman (we think) we have known through years of watching and hearing her? What kind of inner life does the novel reveal?

2. Talk about Hillary's 1969 commencement speech at Wellsley, which has been a famous touchstone throughout her public career. Why do you think Curtis Sittenfeld included it in this novel? What does it reveal about Hillary?

3. Talk about Bill Clinton. How does he come across in the novel? Is it a fair portrait, unfair, a funny one, or unpleasant one?

4. Talk about the sexism and the double standard ever present in American politics that Settinfeld details explicitly. Does her depiction feel about right to you? Does she over- or under-do it?

5. What about portrayals of other real-life characters, primarily Donald Trump?

6. In what way does Hillary's youthful idealism fade as she engages with the realities of politics? Is that loss of idealism inevitable? Why or why not?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Roger's Version
John Updike, 1986
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449912188

Summary
A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery.

Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife — and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
1990

With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.

In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.

Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.

Although autobiographical elements appear in the Rabbit books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.

Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.

• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.

• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
[Discussions of God's existence] might at first sound like alien territory for Mr. Updike, and yet ... it provides him with a comfortable armature on which to drape some of his favorite preoccupations. Questions of faith and existential doubt, after all, hover along the margins of many of his novels—surfacing ... most recently in The Witches of Eastwick, which featured the Devil in a starring role—and his heroes, over the years, have all suffered from ''the tension and guilt of being human.'' Torn between ... spiritual yearnings and ... self-fulfillment, they hunger for salvation even as they submit to the demands of the flesh .... [In this novel, Updike's] unpleasant characters might make for rather grim reading, but by presenting them through the scrim of his narrator, Mr. Updike diffuses some of their vitriol. Further, his command of narrative techniques—his orchestration of emotional and physical details, his modulation of voice, his quick, lyric facility with language—is so assured in this novel, so fluent, that even the most hesistant reader is soon drawn irresistibly into Roger's fictional world.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Sex and its combinations and permutations apart, two of Updike's commanding, long-standing interests in theology and various kinds of science come together to form the matrix of his new novel. The conflicting ideas are as ancient as time: reason versus faith; science versus religion; belief versus any of the forms of unbelief. The contestants representing the fundamental opposition are the narrator, Roger Lambert, 52, a former minister, now a professor of divinity at a New England university, theologically a (Karl) "Barthian all the way" with a civilized tolerance for heretics and the steadfast conviction that God must be taken on faith; and Dale Kohler, 28, a computer scientist fixed in the belief that at the base of all science "God is showing through,'' now working on a definitive demonstration by computer technology of God's existence. That would keep anyone busy, but Dale finds a few hours a week for an affair with Roger's angry, unhappy wife, and Roger's version of belief does not prevent him from having a brief fling with his half-sister's daughter, herself an unmarried mother. For all Updike's finesse and dexterity in the deployment of ideas, there is more arcane computerology here than readers, including his most devoted, can digest by force-feeding, and probably more theology as well. Most readers will also think the characters contrived, mouthpieces for the perspectives they espouse.
Publishers Weekly

Updike's 12th novel continues his portrayal of middle America in all its social, religious, and cultural ramifications. Divinity professor Roger Lambert is visited by Dale Kohler, an earnest young student who wants a grant to prove the existence of God by computer. The visit disrupts Roger's ordinary existence, bringing him into contact with the wild and sexy Verna (his half-sister's daughter), and leading to his wife's affair with Dale. Updike spends a great deal of time in this novel discussing religion, sex, and computers, not always to the advantage of the characters. There are some fine Updike touches—just the right phrase or detail—but it still adds up to a rather lifeless work (perhaps intentionally so). Roger's is an unattractive character with whom we only occasionally become truly involved. Roger's Version is more Marry Me than Rabbit Is Rich. —Thomas Lavoie, formerly with English Dept., Syracuse Univ., N.Y.
Library Journal

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 Roger's Version:

1. The subject of Roger's Version is the age-old argument between faith and science—and how one can know the existence of God. Talk about the ways in which Updike uses his novel to portray this philosophical debate?

2. Do you find the discussions between Roger and Dale intriguing and enlightening? Or do you find them a heavy-handed drag on the flow of the novel? In other words, were you interested or bored with this book?

3. How does Esther's pregnancy reflect, in a very human way, the theological questions that Kohler and Lambert ponder?

4. Consider the parallels of this novel with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850): the names Roger (Chillingworth), (Dimmes)Dale and (H)Esther (Prynne) are clues.

5. Is Roger's "version" the only version in this story? Could there be other versions as well? Can Roger be trusted as a reliable narrator?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Romance Reader's Guide to Life
Sharon Pywell, 2017
Flatiron Books
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250101754

Summary
As a young girl, Neave was often stuck in a world that didn’t know what to do with her. As her mother not unkindly told her, she was never going to grow up to be a great beauty.

Her glamorous sister, Lilly, moved easily through the world, a parade of handsome men in pursuit. Her brother didn’t want a girl joining his group of friends.

And their small town of Lynn, Massachusetts, didn’t have a place for a girl whose feelings often put her at war with the world — often this meant her mother, her brother, and the town librarian who wanted to keep her away from the Dangerous Books she really wanted to read.

But through an unexpected friendship, Neave finds herself with a forbidden copy of The Pirate Lover, a steamy romance, and Neave discovers a world of passion, love, and betrayal. And it is to this world that as a grown up she retreats to again and again when real life becomes too much.

Neave finds herself rereading The Pirate Lover more than she ever would have expected because as she gets older, life does not follow the romances she gobbled up as a child. When Neave and Lilly are about to realize their professional dream, Lilly suddenly disappears.

Neave must put her beloved books down and take center stage, something she has been running from her entire life. And she must figure out what happened to Lilly — and if she’s next.

Who Neave turns to help her makes Sharon Pywell's The Romance Reader's Guide to Life one of the most original, entertaining, exciting, and chilling novels you will read this year. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Sharon Pywell grew up on the edge of the snow belt in upstate New York. She has published in a number of literary quarterlies and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony. Her previous novels include What Happened to Henry and Everything After. Professionally, she has run dog kennels and dance companies, though she now teaches and writes in Boston. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
A lively blend of suspense, comedy, and paranormal fiction and women’s fiction, Romance Reader’s Guide to Life pulls the reader into the post WW II life of two sisters, one a daring, world wise woman eager to find and exercise her power as an adult, the other a shy bookworm who never quite manages to fit in neatly with what the world expects of a woman. With touching irony, it turns out that the more experienced of the two is not as adept at seeing people for who they are as her less worldly sister. Fans of Hoffman’s Practical Magic will appreciate the touch of whimsy that turns what might have been a heavy handed sermon of a story in the hands of a less adroit writer into a touching portrayal of the bond sisters share. Read more…
Clara Kless - LitLovers

Beautiful and perfectly paced.
People

Haunting yet touching.… Equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking, rippling outward like a pebble in a lake.
Charleston Post and Courier

One of those books that pulls and tugs at you.
Denver Post

[A] tongue-in-cheek commentary on the influence of romances on societal expectations.… This is simultaneously the leisurely coming-of-age of two sisters, a bodice-ripper pastiche, and a psychological thriller that never truly embraces its romantic aspects.
Publishers Weekly

A compelling mix of mystery, love, family dynamics, and growing up. Smart and smartly told.… A pirate romance novel, as unlikely as that seems, plays an important role, revealing to Neave some of the secrets of life.
Library Journal

Equal parts mystery, romance, and family saga, with a dash of dark comedy, this book has something for fans of all genres.
Booklist

[A] zesty fictional stew. The author throws us off balance from the get-go, as older sister Lilly opens the story by revealing that she’s dead.… Smart, funny, and compulsively readable: this one may finally win the under-recognized author the wider audience her talent deserves.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Discuss Mrs. Daniels’s defense of romance novels: "The first thing that might happen to you is that people mock you for reading them. They think that women who read romances are idiots. I assure you, they are not…They are people who trust that love exists and that it is more powerful than bad logic or bad writing." What do you think? Did The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life change your opinion of romance novels?

2. When Electra Gates meets Basil Le Cherche, her mood is that "of a huntress who, at the same moment that she understood herself to be engaged in a blood sport, felt that she was the hunted as well as the hunter." She revels in these new feelings. Discuss the power dynamics within The Pirate Lover and how they compare to those within Neave and Lilly’s stories.

3. Neave tells us: "This was the first time in my life, listening to Mrs. Daniels with The Pirate Lover and Leaves of Grass all tangled up in my head, that I felt the truth of this — everybody died. Such a dark discovery, but also so wild and satisfying. There was a pull toward dark things in the poem and in the romance, both. What did it mean that there was this terrible sweet pull?" How is that "terrible sweet pull" explored in The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life? What is the connection between pleasure and danger for the various characters?

4. Neave’s mother often criticizes her daughter’s outspokenness and lack of femininity: "Happy women aren’t like that, Neave. They understand that others depend on them and they shape themselves to others. You’re just going to make yourself unhappy by insisting on your own way. Smart women don’t do that…You’re going to have to start damping yourself down. You’ll do yourself mischief if you don’t. You’ll end up alone. You’ll be too hard to love." Discuss how this novel explores and subverts traditional gender roles. Would you consider it feminist?

5. Neave is shocked to learn that Snyder read The Pirate Lover, too: "My brother had turned the same pages that I had, but read an entirely different story." Compare and contrast the romance novels and comics that are so important to the siblings growing up. Have you ever experienced men and women interpreting the same thing very differently?

6. From "Where She Is Now," Lilly wryly remarks: "If you’ve never been treated like a goddess, I’ll tell you, it messes with your judgment. You forget, if you ever knew it to begin with, that lots of goddesses end up sacrificed on some altar or other." Do you agree? Can you think of a modern-day "altar" and a modern-day "goddess" who sits upon it?

7. Lilly tells Boppit: "Neave’s so vulnerable…. You know that book she rereads every year? The one with the pirate? She actually thinks that that book is the truth: good triumphing over evil, love triumphing over everything." He responds: "But that is the truth, Lilly." Do you agree? Does The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life argue that good is the more powerful force in the universe, or evil?

8. Boppit argues that "glamour has always required a little touch of tramp. It’s why your ‘Fast Girl’ hot pink and ‘Vampy Red’ flew out the door. Every girl wants a little Pirate Lover in her life." Be Your Best cosmetics is in large part about female empowerment, encouraging women to achieve success in business, but it stands out from its competitors largely because of its "bad girl" line of makeup. Are those contradictory impulses?

9. The Pirate Lover is very much Electra’s coming-of-age story: "That young woman was gone, and here in her place was a creature who could embrace both battle and lovemaking, and the only opinion in the world besides her own that swayed her was his — because he was hers, chosen with the full freedom of her heart and soul, given to him with the surging fullness of her own desires." Discuss how her story’s resolution compares to Neave’s and Lilly’s. What can they teach us about the relationship between being in love and being independent?

10. The Romance Reader’s Guide to Life plays with genre in surprising ways, juxtaposing the romance novel with the more traditional historical narrative, and including a talking, cross-dressing dog and narration from the afterlife. Did this unconventional structure work for you? What does it suggest about the difficulty (or futility) of categorizing books or elevating certain genres above others?

11. In her author’s note, Sharon Pywell writes: "In Romancelandia, sex and power were tangled, even interdependent. But wasn’t that the way it really was? Weren’t they also linked in The Taming of the Shrew, in Wuthering Heights, in the evening news reports of recent domestic murders?" Neave discovers this, too, when she has similar kinds of revelations reading The Pirate Lover and books by Walt Whitman and Charlotte Bronte. Do you agree with the suggestion that romance novels are rooted in the classics, in some universally shared idea of the mating dance?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Room
Emma Donoghue, 2010
Little, Brown & Co.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781443449625

Summary
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough...not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (From the publisher.)

See the 2015 movie with Brie Larson (Oscar winner) and Jacob Trimblay.

Author Bio
• Birth—October 24, 1969
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., University College Dublin; Ph.D., Cambridge University
• Awards—Irish Book Award
• Currently—lives in London, Ontario, Canada

Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin, Ireland, the youngest of eight children. She is the daughter of Frances (nee Rutledge) and academic and literary critic Denis Donoghue. Other than her tenth year, which she refers to as "eye-opening" while living in New York, Donoghue attended Catholic convent schools throughout her early years.

She earned a first-class honours BA from the University College Dublin in English and French (though she admits to never having mastered spoken French). Donoghue went on receive her PhD in English from Girton College at Cambridge University. Her thesis was on the concept of friendship between men and women in 18th-century English fiction.

At Cambridge, she met her future life partner Christine Roulston, a Canadian, who is now professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Western Ontario. They moved permanently to Canada in 1998, and Donoghue became a Canadian citizen in 2004. She lives in London, Ontario, with Roulston and their two children, Finn and Una.

Works
Donoghue has been able to make a living as a writer since she was 23. Doing so enables her to claim that she's never had an "honest job" since she was sacked after a summer as a chambermaid. In 1994, at only 25, she published first novel, Stir Fry, a contemporary coming of age novel about a young Irish woman discovering her sexuality.

Donoghue is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel, Room—its popularity practically made her a household name. Room spent months on bestseller lists and won the Irish Book Award; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange prize, and the (Canadian) Governor General's Award. In 2015, the novel was adapted to film. Donoghue wrote the screenplay, which earned her a nomination for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Bafta Award.

Since Room, Donoghue has published seven books, her most recent released in 2020—The Pull of the Stars. (Adapted from the author's website and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/22/2016.)

Book Reviews
Here come the debating points that are embedded in Ms. Donoghue's story. Was the world inside Room somehow safer than the world outside? Will it be damaging for Jack to have to share his mother with new people in her life—or with the people she left behind? Will Ma still be content to do nothing but interact with her frisky son? Is it harder to choose freely from a whole bowl of lollipops than to have no choice at all? Room is sophisticated in outlook and execution, but it's not too complicated to use actual lollipops to frame that theoretical question. Fortunately Ms. Donoghue makes both Ma and Jack too unpredictable for any of those answers to be easy.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Jack's voice is one of the pure triumphs of the novel: in him, [Donoghue] has invented a child narrator who is one of the most engaging in years—his voice so pervasive I could hear him chatting away during the day when I wasn't reading the book. Donoghue rearranges language to evoke the sweetness of a child's learning without making him coy or overly darling… Through dialogue and smartly crafted hints of eavesdropping, Donoghue fills us in a on Jack's world without heavy hands or clunky exposition…a truly memorable novel…It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live.
Aimee Bender - New York Times Book Review

[O]ne of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year.... Not too cute, not too weirdly precocious, not a fey mouthpiece for the author's profundities, Jack expresses a poignant mixture of wisdom, love and naivete that will make you ache to save him—whatever that would mean: Delivering him to the outside world? Keeping him preserved here forever?…until you finish it, beware talking about Room with anyone who might clumsily strip away the suspense that's woven through its raw wonder. You need to enter this small, harrowing place prepared only to have your own world expanded.
Ron Charles - Washington Post

[A] riveting, powerful novel.... Donoghue's inventive storytelling is flawless and absorbing. She has a fantastic ability to build tension in scenes where most of the action takes place in the 12-by-12 room where her central characters reside. Her writing has pulse-pounding sequences that cause the reader's eyes to race over the pages to find out what happens next.... Room is likely to haunt readers for days, if not longer. It is, hands down, one of the best books of the year.
Liz Raftery - Boston Globe

Only a handful of authors have ever known how to get inside the mind of a child and then get what they know on paper. Henry James, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and, more recently, Jean Stafford and Eric Kraft come to mind, and after that one gropes for names. But now they have company. Emma Donoghue's latest novel, Room, is narrated by a 5-year-old boy so real you could swear he was sitting right beside you.... Room is so beautifully contrived that it never once seems contrived. But be warned: once you enter, you'll be Donoghue's willing prisoner right down to the last page.
Malcolm Jones - Newsweek

[T]he developments in this novel—there are enough plot twists to provide a dramatic arc of breathtaking suspense—are astonishing.... While there have been several true-life stories of women and children held captive, little has been written about the pain of re-entry, and Donoghue's bravado in investigating that potentially terrifying transformation grants the novel a frightening resonance that will keep readers rapt.
Publishers Weekly

Gripping, riveting, and close to the bone, this story grabs you and doesn't let go. Donoghue skillfully builds a suspenseful narrative evoking fear and hate and hope—but most of all, the triumph of a mother's ferocious love. Highly recommended for readers of popular fiction. —Susanne Wells, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Library Journal

Room is beautifully written as a first-person narrative from Jack’s perspective, and within it, Donoghue has constructed a quiet, private, and menacing world that slowly unbends with a mother and son’s love and determination. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist

Talented, versatile Donoghue relates a searing tale of survival and recovery, in the voice of a five-year-old boy.... Donoghue brilliantly shows mother and son grappling with very different issues as they adjust to freedom.... Wrenching, as befits the grim subject matter, but also tender, touching and at times unexpectedly funny.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the entire book is told in Jack’s voice? Do you think it is effective?

2. What are some of the ways in which Jack’s development has been stunted by growing up in Room? How has he benefited?

3. If you were Ma, what would you miss most about the outside world?

4. What would you do differently if you were Jack’s parent? Would you tell Jack about the outside world from the start?

5. If Ma had never given birth to Jack, what would her situation in Room be like?

6. What would you ask for, for Sundaytreat, if you were Jack? If you were Ma?

7. Describe the dynamic between Old Nick and Ma. Why does the author choose not to tell us Old Nick’s story?

8. What does joining the outside world do to Jack? To Ma?

9. What role do you think the media play in the novel?

10. In a similar situation, how would you teach a child the difference between the real world and what they watch on television?

11. Why are we so fascinated by stories of long-term confinement?

12. What were you most affected by in the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Room of Marvels
James Bryan Smith, 2007
B & H Publishing
197 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780805445633

Summary
In one tragic blow after another, accomplished Christian writer Tim Hudson lost his mother, his close friend, and his two-year-old daughter. Now he’s on the brink of losing his faith.

Room of Marvels takes readers on a silent spiritual retreat with Tim where he is swept up in a dream vision of heaven and given a guided tour by those he has lost. Reminiscent of the C. S. Lewis classic, The Great Divorce, the book carries a contemporary voice that made Library Journal declare it “a good companion to Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven.

Remarkably, Room of Marvels mirrors author James Bryan Smith’s own heart-wrenching season of loss when his mother (Wanda), close friend (“Awesome God” singer Rich Mullins), and two-year-old daughter (Madeline) passed away within months of each other.

Room of Marvels will comfort those touched by grief and stir the hunger for heaven in every reader. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
James Bryan Smith teaches theology at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. His previous books include A Spiritual Formation Workbook, Devotional Classics (coauthored with Richard Foster), and Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven. Jim and his wife, Meghan, have two children, Jacob and Hope. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
If you’ve ever felt the sting of death from the loss of one you love, Smith’s book will lead you into a warm, inviting room.
Knight Ridder

One of those profound, special books that only comes along once in awhile.
InfuzeMag.con

There's some serious theology here, but communicated in a way that brings it to life, as a story…Highly recommended.
Christian Fiction Review

Revealing the hope of heaven, this book gives more than platitudes. It portrays a different—and comforting—mindset about death, showing in story form that for the Christian, what appears to be death is really life. Though I’ve never lost someone close to me, it will be the first book I reach for when I do. If you can’t find the words to say to a friend who has lost someone, let Room of Marvels speak for you.
Katie Hart - Christian Book Previews

[All of what Tim encounters in the dream] sounds very kitschy and schtick-y.... Yet it's not. Smith, who is Chaplain and Assistant Professor of Theology at Wichita's Friends University, has crafted a deceptively simple and psychologically clever read about the things—thing, really—that matter most to Christian faith.
Faithful Reader.com

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 Room of Marvels:

1. When Tim Hudson says he has arrived at "God's address," what does he mean? Is that a literal...or metaphorical address?

2. Why does Hudson head to a monastery? What is he hoping to find...or escape from?

3. What is the state of Hudson's faith at this point? What is he questioning?

4. Why does Tim find Brother Taylor irritating? What role does Brother Taylor play in Tim's soul journey?

5. Talk about the significance of Tim's dream. What happens, whom does he meet and where is he taken? Is it a dream, or is it something else? (For Narnia lovers, who is Jack?!)

6. What does Tim learn through his dream? What are the lessons or insights he gains about himself and his life? Are those insights applicable to you...to others?

7. A review by Faithful Reader says that everything in this "dream revolves around love: love given, taken, rejected, fulfilled." Discuss that observation: what does it mean; do you agree?

8. How does this book portray death? Does it open up, or offer, a different perspective? Or does it align with your own perspective?

9. Has this book altered you? How does Smith present Christianity, or what it means to be religious? Does he present a different view or one that is similar to your own?

10.Would this book—its message—be of help to someone grieving the loss of a loved one? Would you recommend it to others who are not in the midst of grief?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Room on Rue Amelie
Kristin Harmel, 2018
Gallery Books
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501171406

Summary
This powerful novel of fate, resistance, and family tells the tale of an American woman, a British RAF pilot, and a young Jewish teenager whose lives intersect in occupied Paris during the tumultuous days of World War II.

When newlywed Ruby Henderson Benoit arrives in Paris in 1939 with her French husband Marcel, she imagines strolling arm in arm along the grand boulevards, awash in the golden afternoon light.

But war is looming on the horizon, and as France falls to the Nazis, her marriage begins to splinter, too.

Charlotte Dacher is eleven when the Germans roll into the French capital, their sinister swastika flags snapping in the breeze. After the Jewish restrictions take effect and Jews are ordered to wear the yellow star, Charlotte can’t imagine things getting much worse.

But then the mass deportations begin, and her life is ripped forever apart.

Thomas Clarke joins the British Royal Air Force to protect his country, but when his beloved mother dies in a German bombing during the waning days of the Blitz, he wonders if he’s really making a difference.

Then he finds himself in Paris, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, and he discovers a new reason to keep fighting—and an unexpected road home.

When fate brings them together, Ruby, Charlotte, and Thomas must summon the courage to defy the Nazis—and to open their own broken hearts—as they fight to survive.

Rich with historical drama and emotional depth, this is an unforgettable story that will stay with you long after the final page is turned. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 4, 1979
• Born—Newton, Massachesetts, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Florida
• Currently—lives in Orlando, Florida

Kristin Harmel is an American author with more than a dozen novels to her name. Originally from Massachusetts, she gained her first writing experience at the age of 16 as a sports reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, and Tampa Bay All Sports magazine while still attending Northeast High School in St. Petersburg, Florida.

A graduate of the University of Florida, Harmel was a reporter for People magazine starting in 2000. Her work has appeared in dozens of other publications, including Men's Health, Glamour, YM, Teen People, People en Español, Runner's World, American Baby, Every Day With Rachel Ray, and more.

Harmel is the author of more than 10 books, which have been translated into many languages around the world. They include more recently including The Book of Lost Names (2020), The Winemaker’s Wife (2019), The Room on Rue Amelie (2018), and The Sweetness of Forgetting (2012).

Harmel resides in Orlando, Florida with her husband Jason. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/22/2015.)

Book Reviews
Harmel injects new life into a well-worn story… about the struggle to find normalcy amid the horrors of WWII.… [An] emotionally fraught story… [and] celebration of those…who found the courage to face life head-on.
Publishers Weekly

[F]ocusing primarily on the development of a wartime romance rather than on immersive details of life under German occupation…. [Harmel] does create likable if somewhat cliched protagonists… [but] the book's ending feels…emotionally manipulative. —Mara Bandy Fass, Champaign P.L., IL
Library Journal

Harmel writes a poignant novel based loosely on the true story of an American woman who helped on the Comet Line, which rescued hundreds of airmen and soldiers. This compelling story celebrates hope and bravery in the face of evil.
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. Describe Ruby Henderson’s first encounter with Marcel Benoit. Who or what is responsible for the distance that grows between them during their short marriage?

2. "Why do we have to be Jewish anyhow?" (page 14) How does eleven-year-old Charlotte Dacher experience religious discrimination in the days leading up to the Nazi occupation of France? To what extent do her feelings of alienation facilitate her special bond with the American expatriate Ruby Benoit? What shared qualities make Charlotte and Ruby compatible?

3. Compare and contrast Marcel Benoit’s and Charlotte Dacher’s reactions to the news that Ruby is pregnant. What do their reactions reveal about their characters and their feelings about Ruby?

4. "I don’t understand. You’re working for the Allies? Why didn’t you tell me?"(page 60) Discuss Marcel’s secrecy about his underground Resistance efforts. How reasonable is his decision to keep his work concealed from his wife? Does Ruby’s sense of personal betrayal in light of Marcel’s secret seem justified? Why, or why not?

5. How does Ruby’s baby’s stillbirth impact her relationship with the Dacher family and her sense of personal responsibility for Charlotte? How does the child’s death affect Ruby’s relationship with her husband, Marcel?

6. "I must help. I must take over Marcel’s work on the [escape] line."(page 103) Why does Ruby volunteer to continue her late husband’s work in the immediate aftermath of his death? What does her determination suggest about her love for her adopted country?

7. How does the arrival of the injured RAF pilot Thomas Clarke help Ruby to regain her self-confidence and sense of purpose? What does his willingness to risk discovery in order to help Charlotte’s mother reveal about his nature?

8. "This is France, Madame Benoit. We are French citizens."(page 204) Discuss the roundups taking place in Paris during the German occupation. Why does Monsieur Dacher persist in believing his French citizenship will protect him and his family from being arrested? To what extent does Ruby’s eventual arrest and imprisonment as an American citizen seem surprising?

9. How does Lucien, the young forger, become an important part of Ruby’s extended Resistance family? What explains the intensity of Lucien’s connection with Charlotte?

10. How does Thomas’s return to Paris two years after Ruby helped him to escape the first time confirm the depth of their feelings for each other? Given her unique predicament—serving as a surrogate parent to Charlotte, sheltering wayward Allied pilots, and eking out survival during wartime without any steady income—why does Ruby surrender to Thomas’s affections? How does her eventual pregnancy transform her?

11. "This war, it has changed everything about the world. But our most important lives are still on the inside, aren’t they? What matters is what’s in your heart.” (page 312) Discuss Charlotte’s distinction between inside lives and outside lives. Why might difficult historical and cultural periods such as wartime serve as catalysts for more dramatic interior lives?

12. How would you describe Ravensbrück, the German work camp where Ruby is imprisoned? Why does her pregnancy make Ruby especially vulnerable in the camp? What does the altruism of fellow detainees and German civilians reveal about the potential for goodness in the midst of tremendous evil?

13. To what extent were the deaths of Ruby and Thomas a narrative surprise to you? Why do you think the author chose to end their lives at the same point in the dramatic arc of the novel? How would you describe your reaction to the author’s description of their afterlife reunion in the poppy fields of California?

14. Discuss the depictions of Paris in wartime in the novel. How do the author’s details of the behavior of German soldiers toward the French, of the detention camps, and of the efforts of the Resistance enable you to visualize the novel’s milieu? Which details did you find most compelling? Why?

15. Why do you think the author chose to frame her novel with beginning and ending chapters involving Charlotte and Lucien? Based on ambiguities in the book’s opening chapter, what assumptions did you make about Ruby and Thomas as you read the novel? How did you feel when you discovered the final chapter was about Charlotte and Lucien?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

A Room with a View
E.M. Forster, 1908
~250 pp. (Varies by publisher.)

Summary
E.M. Forster's brilliant comedy of manners shines a gently ironic light on the attitudes and customs of the British middle class at the beginning of the 20th century.

When Lucy Honeychurch, visiting Italy, mentions the lack of a view from her room, George Emerson and his father offer to swap. But Lucy's suspicions that the Emersons are the wrong sort of people seem confirmed when George impulsively kisses her during a picnic in the Tuscan countryside. Soon, however, thoughts of that kiss have Lucy questioning her engagement to boorish, if utterly acceptable, Cecil Vyse.

All in all, the situation presents quite a muddle for a young woman who wishes to be absolutely truthful—even when she's lying to herself about the most important aspects of life and love. (From Penguin Classics—cover image, top-right.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1879
• Where—London, UK
• Death—June 7, 1970
• Where—Coventry, UK
• Education—B. A., (two: in classics and in history); M.A.,
Cambridge

Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect." His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.

Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (nee Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.

He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2013) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt.

Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

After A Passage to India
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.

Forster was a closeted homosexual and lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving in 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.

Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1946 and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry on June 7, 1970. He was 91.

Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel Arctic Summer.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted to film in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy." The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by the Merchant-Ivory team.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.

Critical reception
In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began:

E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something. (Trilling 1943).

Key themes
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society.

His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay "What I Believe." When Forster’s cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics—curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."

Two of Forster's best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox in that novel and Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/25/2013.)

Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

Like the heroines of Mansfield Park and Daisy Miller, Lucy begins the novel as a naif on the threshold of adulthood in a strange new world.... Certainly A Room with a View can be appreciated from this perspective as a story of sexual awakening.... But it can be read on other levels as well. As a domestic comedy in the tradition of Jane Austen, it brilliantly skewers the world of Edwardian manners and social codes, providing some of Forster's most riotous and revealing portraits in the characters of Cecil Vyse and Charlotte Bartlett. It also can be enjoyed as a book about the contradictions and conflicts of being human: how we reconcile our inner lives with outside expectations, and how it is possible, by opening one's mind, to find faith and love in unexpected places.
Penguin Classics

Discussion Questions
1. How are Lucy's character and mood captured in the descriptions of her piano playing throughout the novel? Why does she refuse to play Beethoven in Mrs. Vyse's well-appointed flat? What compels her to sing, after breaking her engagement with Cecil, the song that ends with the line "Easy live and quiet die"?

2. Forster's use of light and darkness, vision and blindness, day and night has transparent meaning in many passages: Lucy throws open the window of her room with a view while Charlotte closes the shades. Cecil is best suited to a room, while George is in his element in the naked sunlight of the Sacred Lake. Discuss the variations on the theme of clarity and shadow in the book, for example the twilight on the Piazza Signoria before Lucy witnesses the murder, or her attempts to flee "the king of terrors—Light" in the novel's second half.

3. Lucy and George both stand outside Britain's traditional class structure. George is a clerk, the son of a journalist and grandson of a laborer. Lucy is the daughter of a lawyer and her social status is "more splendid than her antecedents entitled her to." What role does social class play in the novel? Why did Forster choose Cecil to deliver the statement: "The classes ought to mix...There ought to be intermarriage—all sorts of things. I believe in democracy."?

4. Mr. Beebe is portrayed early in the novel as an observant, thoughtful counselor with a good sense of humor and an unusually open mind for a clergyman. Soon after meeting Lucy he predicts that "one day music and life shall mingle" for her. Why does he fail, in the end, to support her decision to leave Cecil for George?

5. In comparison, Charlotte Bartlett is absurdly prudish, forbidding her cousin even to sleep in the bed where George Emerson had slept. If George's surmise at the novel's end is correct, what motivates her to help bring the lovers together by facilitating Lucy's fateful meeting with Mr. Emerson? What does this turnabout suggest about the repressive forces in society? Is she, as George jokes, made of the "same stuff as parsons are made of"?

5. "Muddle" is one of Forster's favorite words and seems to carry more weight in his work than in current colloquial usage. Lucy declares at the end of Part 1, "I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly." What does Mr. Emerson mean when he uses the word to describe Lucy's state of mind near the novel's end, saying, "It is easy to face Death and Fate...It is on my muddles that I look back with horror"?

6. Lucy and George's final happiness is clouded by their severed relations with those she left behind. The Honeychurches "were disgusted at her past hypocrisy," and Mr. Beebe will never forgive them. Do you think Forster believes, as Lucy asserts, that "if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run"?

7.What is "medieval" about Cecil's attitude toward women in general and toward Lucy in particular? What role is she allotted in his notion of chivalry? Why does Lucy feel, after George throws her blood-stained photographs into the Arno, that it is "hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man"? What kind of companionship and protection does George offer in exchange?

8. Forster, who was greatly influenced by the art of Italy during his first visit there, not only explores the proper relationship of life and art in A Room with a View but also uses art to illuminate his characters. What do we learn about the inner lives of George and Mr. Emerson from their views of Giotto's fresco in Santa Croce (Chapter 2)? Why is Lucy's outburst over Mr. Eager like "Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine"?

9.A frequent criticism of Forster's plots is his reliance on coincidence and chance. What improbable circumstances are required to unite Lucy and George? Is George right when he says of their reunion in England, "It is Fate. Everything is Fate"? Does the novel suggest an external force that brings the lovers together?

10.There are many kinds of deceit in the book: betrayal by friends, secrets between lovers, and most importantly Lucy's self-deceit. Four of the last five chapters show Lucy lying to nearly everyone else in the book. Which kinds of lies are most harmful to the "personal relations" that Forster cherished?

11.Though sparing in his descriptions of physical love, Forster often expresses the physical component of spiritual passion indirectly, as in his description of Lucy's piano playing: "Like every true performer she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire." What balance between the physical and emotional expressions of love does Mr. Emerson suggest in his statement, "I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.... I only wish poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body"?
(Questions from Penguin Classics—cover image, top right.)

top of page (summary)

A Room with a View
E.M. Forster, 1908
Penguin Random
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780141183299

Summary
E.M. Forster's vision of love struggling to assert itself in spite of the rigid class boundaries of Edwardian England.

Visiting Florence with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte as a chaperone, Lucy Honeychurch meets the unconventional, lower-class Mr Emerson and his son, George.

Upon her return to England, Lucy becomes engaged to the supercilious Cecil Vyse, but she finds herself increasingly torn between the expectations of the world in which she moves and the passionate yearnings of her heart.

More than a love story, A Room with a View is a penetrating social comedy and a brilliant study of contrasts—in values, social class, and cultural perspectives—and the ingenuity of fate.

In his sparkling introduction Malcolm Bradbury notes that A Room with a View...

was the work where Forster laid down most of his key themes, the place where he displayed both his warmth and sharpness, and developed his famous light style.

This edition also contains suggestions for further reading and explanatory notes. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1879
• Where—London, UK
• Death—June 7, 1970
• Where—Coventry, UK
• Education—B. A., (two: in classics and in history); M.A., Cambridge University

Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect." His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.

Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (nee Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.

He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2013) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt.

Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

After A Passage to India
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.

Forster was a closeted homosexual and lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving in 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.

Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1946 and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry on June 7, 1970. He was 91.

Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel Arctic Summer.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted to film in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy." The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by the Merchant-Ivory team.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.

Critical reception
In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began:

Discussion Questions
1. How are Lucy’s character and mood captured in the descriptions of her piano playing throughout the novel? Why does she refuse to play Beethoven in Mrs. Vyse’s well-appointed flat? What compels her to sing, after breaking her engagement with Cecil, the song that ends with the line "Easy live and quiet die"?

2. Forster’s use of light and darkness, vision and blindness, day and night has transparent meaning in many passages: Lucy throws open the window of her room with a view while Charlotte closes the shades. Cecil is best suited to a room, while George is in his element in the naked sunlight of the Sacred Lake. Discuss the variations on the theme of clarity and shadow in the book, for example the twilight on the Piazza Signoria before Lucy witnesses the murder, or her attempts to flee "the king of terrors—Light" in the novel’s second half.

3. Lucy and George both stand outside Britain’s traditional class structure. George is a clerk, the son of a journalist and grandson of a laborer. Lucy is the daughter of a lawyer and her social status is "more splendid than her antecedents entitled her to." What role does social class play in the novel? Why did Forster choose Cecil to deliver the statement: "The classes ought to mix.... There ought to be intermarriage—all sorts of things. I believe in democracy."?

4. Mr. Beebe is portrayed early in the novel as an observant, thoughtful counselor with a good sense of humor and an unusually open mind for a clergyman. Soon after meeting Lucy he predicts that "one day music and life shall mingle" for her. Why does he fail, in the end, to support her decision to leave Cecil for George?

5. In comparison, Charlotte Bartlett is absurdly prudish, forbidding her cousin even to sleep in the bed where George Emerson had slept. If George’s surmise at the novel’s end is correct, what motivates her to help bring the lovers together by facilitating Lucy’s fateful meeting with Mr. Emerson? What does this turnabout suggest about the repressive forces in society? Is she, as George jokes, made of the "same stuff as parsons are made of"?

6. "Muddle" is one of Forster’s favorite words and seems to carry more weight in his work than in current colloquial usage. Lucy declares at the end of Part 1, "I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly." What does Mr. Emerson mean when he uses the word to describe Lucy’s state of mind near the novel’s end, saying, "It is easy to face Death and Fate.... It is on my muddles that I look back with horror"?

7. Lucy and George’s final happiness is clouded by their severed relations with those she left behind. The Honeychurches "were disgusted at her past hypocrisy," and Mr. Beebe will never forgive them. Do you think Forster believes, as Lucy asserts, that "if we act the truth, the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run"?

8. What is "medieval" about Cecil’s attitude toward women in general and toward Lucy in particular? What role is she allotted in his notion of chivalry? Why does Lucy feel, after George throws her blood-stained photographs into the Arno, that it is "hopeless to look for chivalry in such a man"? What kind of companionship and protection does George offer in exchange?

9. Forster, who was greatly influenced by the art of Italy during his first visit there, not only explores the proper relationship of life and art in A Room with a View but also uses art to illuminate his characters. What do we learn about the inner lives of George and Mr. Emerson from their views of Giotto’s fresco in Santa Croce (Chapter 2)? Why is Lucy’s outburst over Mr. Eager like "Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine"?

10. A frequent criticism of Forster’s plots is his reliance on coincidence and chance. What improbable circumstances are required to unite Lucy and George? Is George right when he says of their reunion in England, "It is Fate. Everything is Fate"? Does the novel suggest an external force that brings the lovers together?

11. There are many kinds of deceit in the book: betrayal by friends, secrets between lovers, and most importantly Lucy’s self-deceit. Four of the last five chapters show Lucy lying to nearly everyone else in the book. Which kinds of lies are most harmful to the "personal relations" that Forster cherished?

12. Though sparing in his descriptions of physical love, Forster often expresses the physical component of spiritual passion indirectly, as in his description of Lucy’s piano playing: "Like every true performer she was intoxicated by the mere feel of the notes: they were fingers caressing her own; and by touch, not by sound alone, did she come to her desire." What balance between the physical and emotional expressions of love does Mr. Emerson suggest in his statement, "I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.... I only wish poets would say this too: love is of the body; not the body, but of the body"?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Alex Haley, 1974
Vanguard
912 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781593154493

Summary
One of the most important books and television series ever to appear, Roots, galvanized the nation, and created an extraordinary political, racial, social and cultural dialogue that hadn’t been seen since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The book sold over one million copies in the first year, and the miniseries was watched by an astonishing 130 million people. It also won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Roots opened up the minds of Americans of all colors and faiths to one of the darkest and most painful parts of America’s past.

Over the years, both Roots and Alex Haley have attracted controversy, which comes with the territory for trailblazing, iconic books, particularly on the topic of race. Some of the criticism results from whether Roots is fact or fiction and whether Alex Haley confused these two issues, a subject he addresses directly in the book. There is also the fact that Haley was sued for plagiarism when it was discovered that several dozen paragraphs in Roots were taken directly from a novel, Roots, by Harold Courlander, who ultimately received a substantial financial settlement at the end of the case.

But none of the controversy affects the basic issue. Roots fostered a remarkable dialogue about not just the past, but the then present day 1970s and how America had fared since the days portrayed in Roots.

Vanguard Press feels that it is important to publish Roots: The 30th Anniversary Edition to remind the generation that originally read it that there are issues that still need to be discussed and debated, and to introduce to a new and younger generation, a book that will help them understand, perhaps for the first time, the reality of what took place during the time of Roots. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 11, 1921
• Raised—Ithaca, New York, USA
• Death—February 10, 1992
• Where—Seattle, Washington
• Awards—Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Pulitzer Prize

Alex Haley was an American writer. He is best known as the author of the 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It was adapted by ABC as a TV mini-series of the same name and aired in 1977 to a record-breaking 130 million viewers. It had great influence on awareness in the United States of African-American history and inspired a broad interest in genealogy and family history.

Haley had previously written The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), a collaboration through numerous lengthy interviews with the subject, a major African-American leader.

He was working on a second family history novel at his death. Haley had requested that David Stevens, a screenwriter, complete it; the book was published as Alex Haley's Queen. It was adapted as a film of the same name released in 1993.

Early life
Alex Haley was born in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and was the oldest of three brothers and a sister. Haley lived with his family in Henning, Tennessee, before returning to Ithaca with his family when he was five years old. Haley's father was Simon Haley, a professor of agriculture at Alabama A&M University, and his mother was Bertha George Haley (nee Palmer) who was from Henning. The younger Haley always spoke proudly of his father and the obstacles of racism he had overcome.

Like his father, Alex Haley was enrolled at age 15 in Alcorn State University, a historically black college, and, a year later, enrolled at Elizabeth City State College, also historically black, in North Carolina. The following year he returned to his father and stepmother to tell them he had withdrawn from college.

His father felt that Alex needed discipline and growth, and convinced him to enlist in the military when he turned 18. On May 24, 1939, Haley began what became a 20-year career with the United States Coast Guard.

US Coast Guard
Haley enlisted as a mess attendant. Later he was promoted to the rate of petty officer third-class in the rating of steward, one of the few ratings open to African Americans at that time. It was during his service in the Pacific theater of operations that Haley taught himself the craft of writing stories. During his enlistment he was often paid by other sailors to write love letters to their girlfriends. He said that the greatest enemy he and his crew faced during their long voyages was not the Japanese forces but rather boredom.

After World War II, Haley petitioned the U.S. Coast Guard to allow him to transfer into the field of journalism. By 1949 he had become a petty officer first class in the rating of journalist. He later advanced to chief petty officer and held this grade until his retirement from the Coast Guard in 1959. He was the first Chief Journalist in the Coast Guard, the rating having been expressly created for him in recognition of his literary ability.

Haley's awards and decorations from the Coast Guard include the Coast Guard Good Conduct Medal (with 1 silver and 1 bronze service star), American Defense Service Medal (with "Sea" clasp), American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal, Korean Service Medal, National Defense Service Medal, United Nations Service Medal, and the Coast Guard Expert Marksmanship Medal.[7] Additionally, he was awarded the War Service Medal by the Republic of Korea ten years after his death.

Literary career
After retiring from the U.S. Coast Guard, Haley began another phase of his journalism career. He eventually became a senior editor for Reader's Digest magazine.

Playboy magazine
Haley conducted the first interview for Playboy magazine. His interview with jazz musician Miles Davis appeared in the September 1962 issue. Haley elicited candid comments from Davis about his thoughts and feelings on racism. That interview set the tone for what became a significant feature of the magazine. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Playboy Interview with Haley was the longest he ever granted to any publication.

Throughout the 1960s, Haley was responsible for some of the magazine's most notable interviews, including one with George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. He agreed to meet with Haley only after gaining assurance from the writer that he was not Jewish. Haley remained professional during the interview, although Rockwell kept a handgun on the table throughout it. (The interview was recreated in Roots: The Next Generations, with James Earl Jones as Haley and Marlon Brando as Rockwell.)

Haley also interviewed Muhammad Ali, who spoke about changing his name from Cassius Clay. Other interviews include Jack Ruby's defense attorney Melvin Belli, entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., football player Jim Brown, TV host Johnny Carson, and music producer Quincy Jones.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Published in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm Xwas Haley's first book. It describes the trajectory of Malcolm X's life from street criminal to national spokesman for the Nation of Islam to his conversion to Sunni Islam. It also outlines Malcolm X's philosophy of black pride, black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Haley wrote an epilogue to the book summarizing the end of Malcolm X's life, including his assassination in New York's Audubon Ballroom.

Haley ghostwrote the autobiography based on more than 50 in-depth interviews he conducted with Malcolm X between 1963 and the February 1965 assassination. The two men had first met in 1960 when Haley wrote an article about the Nation of Islam for Reader's Digest. They met again when Haley interviewed Malcolm X for Playboy.

The first interviews for the autobiography frustrated Haley. Rather than discussing his own life, Malcolm X spoke about Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam; he became angry about Haley's reminders that the book was supposed to be about Malcolm X. After several meetings, Haley asked Malcolm X to tell him something about his mother. That question drew Malcolm X into recounting his life story.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X has been a consistent best-seller since its 1965 publication. The New York Times reported that six million copies of the book had sold by 1977. In 1998, Time magazine ranked the book as one of the 10 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.

In 1966, Haley received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Roots
In 1976, Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based on his family's history, going back to slavery days. It started with the story of Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in the Gambia in 1767 and transported to the Province of Maryland to be sold as a slave.

Haley claimed to be a seventh-generation descendant of Kunta Kinte, and his work on the novel involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing. He went to the village of Juffure, where Kunta Kinte grew up and which had continued, and listened to a tribal historian (griot) tell the story of Kinte's capture. Haley also traced the records of the ship, The Lord Ligonier, which he said carried his ancestor to the Americas.

Haley has stated that the most emotional moment of his life occurred in 1967 when he stood at the site in Annapolis, Maryland, where his ancestor had arrived from Africa in chains exactly 200 years before. A memorial depicting Haley reading a story to young children gathered at his feet has since been erected in the center of Annapolis.

Roots was eventually published in 37 languages. Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for the work in 1977. The same year, Roots was adapted as a popular television miniseries of the same name by ABC. The serial reached a record-breaking 130 million viewers. Roots emphasized that African Americans have a long history and that not all of that history is necessarily lost, as many believed. Its popularity also sparked a greatly increased public interest in genealogy.

In 1979, ABC aired the sequel miniseries, Roots: The Next Generations, which continued the story of Kunta Kinte's descendants. It concluded with Haley's travel to Juffure. Haley was portrayed at different ages by Kristoff St. John, The Jeffersons actor Damon Evans, and Tony Award winner James Earl Jones.

Haley was briefly a "writer in residence" at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he began work on Roots. He enjoyed spending time at The Savoy, a local bistro in nearby Rome, where he would sometimes pass the time listening to the piano player. Today, there is a special table in honor of Haley, with a painting of Haley writing Roots on a yellow legal tablet

Later life and death
In the late 1970s, Haley began working on a second historical novel based on another branch of his family, traced through his grandmother Queen, the daughter of a black slave woman and her white master. Unable to finish the novel before his death, he had requested that David Stevens complete it. Published as Alex Haley's Queen, it was subsequently adapted as a movie of the same name in 1993.

Late in his life, Haley had acquired a small farm in Norris, Tennessee, adjacent to the Museum of Appalachia, intending to live there. After his death, the property was sold to the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and is now known as The Alex Haley Farm. The CDF uses the property as a national training center and retreat site. An abandoned barn on the property was redesigned as a traditional cantilevered barn by architect Maya Lin and serves as a library for the CDF.

Haley died of a heart attack on February 10, 1992, in Seattle, Washington. He was 70 years old and is buried beside his childhood home in Henning, Tennessee. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/9/2012.)

Book Reviews
The book is an act of love, and it is this which makes it haunting.
New York Times

Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one (A Times Book of the Century).
Charles McGrath - New York Times Books

A Pulitzer Prize-winning story about the family ancestry of author Alex Haley... [and] a symbolic chronicle of the odyssey of African Americans from the continent of Africa to a land not of their choosing.
Washington Post

A gripping mixture of urban confessional and political manifesto, it not only inspired a generation of black activists, but drove home the bitter realities of racism to a mainstream white liberal audience.
Observer (UK)

Groundbreaking.
Associated Press

(Starred review.) [T]he story of the young African boy named Kunte Kinte, who in the late 1700s was kidnapped from his homeland and brought to the United States as a slave. Haley follows Kunte Kinte's family line over the next seven generations, creating a moving historical novel spanning 200 years.
Publishers Weekly

When Roots was published in the mid-1970s, America was still in a period of introspection caused by all things Watergate and the bicentennial celebration. Haley's self-described "novelized amalgam" chronicled seven generations of his family, from West Africa to the United States and back. Roots—both the book and the groundbreaking TV miniseries that followed—became a cultural phenomenon. [Though listed as nonfiction on the cover, Roots is generally considered historical fiction. - Ed.]
Library Journal

Roots is the fictionalized account of Alex Haley's family history and an epic narrative of the African American experience.... The story traces Haley's family history from the imagined birth of his ancestor Kant Kin in an African village in 1750 to the death, seven generations later, of his father in Arkansas. Based on fifteen years of research by Haley, the novel is a combination of fact and fiction...that puts a human face on the suffering of black people through the ordeal of the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Grow. Its combination of compelling, affectionate storytelling and informative history has had a revolutionary effect on the way Americans—black and white—think about the history of a people.
Sacred Fire

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Roses
Leila Meacham, 2010
Grand Central Publishing
609 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446550000

Summary
Spanning the 20th century, the story of Roses takes place in a small East Texas town against the backdrop of the powerful timber and cotton industries, industries controlled by the scions of the town's founding families.

Cotton tycoon Mary Toliver and timber magnate Percy Warwick should have married but unwisely did not, and now must deal with the deceit, secrets, and tragedies of their choice and the loss of what might have been—not just for themselves but for their children, and children's children.

With expert, unabashed, big-canvas storytelling, Roses covers a hundred years, three generations of Texans and the explosive combination of passion for work and longing for love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1938 or 1939
• Where—Minden, Louisiana, USA
• Raised—Texas
• Education—B.A., North Texas State University
• Currently—lives in San Antonio, Texas

Beginning in the 1960s, Ms. Meacham taught English to high school students in a handful of cities in Texas. She published three romance novels in the mid-1980s with Walker & Company, but she mostly found the process burdensome. “I didn’t like the isolation,” she said. “I didn’t like the discipline required. I didn’t like the deadlines. So I put away my pen. The romance novel was not my calling.”

Ms. Meacham was a decade into her retirement, growing increasingly bored...when she returned to Roses, a manuscript that she had started in the 1980s. When she completed the novel, one of her friends made a call to a niece, who just happened to be married to David McCormick, a literary agent in New York. Mr. McCormick agreed to take on the book and later sold it to Grand Central, which published it in January 2010. Reviewers compared it to those door-stopper-size, soap operatic novels by the likes of Belva Plain and Barbara Taylor Bradford that were popular in the late 1970s and ‘80s. [She is currently working a a sequel to Roses.]....

Tumbleweeds [2012], which takes place between 1979 and 2008, begins in a small West Texas town and revolves around two star high school football players who fall for the same girl. Yet other than the contemporary setting, it is very much of a piece with Roses, with twists piled atop twists, and well-intentioned characters who seem to make a wreck of things. (Adapted from the New York Times "Texas Weekly.")

Critics Say . . .
This enthralling stunner, a good old-fashioned read, may herald the overdue return of those delicious doorstop epics from such writers as Barbara Taylor Bradford and Colleen McCullough. Meacham's multigenerational family saga, set in East Texas circa 1914–1985, charts the transformation of Mary Toliver, a wide-eyed 16-year-old heiress, into a calculating cotton plantation queen as hardheaded as Scarlett O'Hara. Her brother, Miles, goes off to WWI, returns home, but then goes back to France to marry Marietta, a French Communist, leaving Mary to deal with their plantation, Somerset, and Darla, their alcoholic mother (who later hangs herself ). Many years later, Mary, now an elderly, terminally ill widow, resolves to defeat the “Toliver Curse” and regrets “selling her soul for Somerset” and giving up her true love, Percy Warwick, the father of their secret child, to marry their friend Ollie DuMont, who helped her save Somerset when Percy refused. Meacham uses three well-balanced viewpoints: Mary's, Percy's and Rachel's, Mary's great-niece, who must confront Percy when she discovers some disquieting family information after Mary dies. A refreshingly nostalgic bouquet of family angst, undying love and “if onlys.”
Publishers Weekly

It's been almost 30 years since the heyday of giant epics in the grand tradition of Edna Ferber and Barbara Taylor Bradford, but Meacham's debut might bring them back. This story of two founding families in a small East Texas town spans the 20th century. When Mary Toliver inherits her family's cotton plantation, Somerset, in 1916, it tears apart her family; her mother turns to alcohol, and her brother leaves. Mary's obsession with Somerset even causes her to lose the love of her life, timber magnate Percy Warwick. By the time she's 85, Mary is determined that the family curse will not continue and, despite her grandniece's love of Somerset, plans for the plantation to be sold after her death. Mary Toliver and Percy Warwick can't share anything more than friendship, but Mary's actions might allow Rachel to see past Somerset to the man who loves her. Verdict: Readers who like an old-fashioned saga will devour this sprawling novel of passion and revenge. Highly recommended. —Lesa Holstine, Glendale P.L., AZ
Library Journal

First-time novelist Meacham’s sweeping, century-encompassing, multigenerational epic is reminiscent of the film Giant, and as large, romantic, and American a tale as Texas itself. —Hilary Hatton
Booklist

The Wars of the Roses relocate to America as a struggle between the Toliver and Warwick families, descended respectively from the houses of Lancaster and York. Emigrating to South Carolina in 1670, these proud clans provided a youngest son each to the 1836 Revolution in Texas, where generations of their offspring have been scrapping ever since. It had to happen that one of the Tolivers would start a-smooching with one of the Warwicks, and so Mary Toliver and Percy Warwick find themselves here in bodice-ripping contortions and secret pacts. Do such stories ever end happily? Meacham begins her saga in recent times, when elderly Mary decides to act on long-hidden feelings by tweaking the noses of her assembled heirs, who patiently await their cut of fortune and a big, beautiful estate in the piney woods, part of a genteel town that Mary has pretty well single-handedly put in the pages of Southern Living and Texas Monthly, which "extolled its Greek Revivalist charm, regional cuisine, and clean restrooms." There are worse places on earth, and worse people than the feuding Texans, though as dark secrets go, Mary and Percy's is less dark than most gothic-romance readers are used to. Still, there are plenty of broken hearts (and at least one broken organ). As San Antonio novelist Meacham (Crowning Design, 1984, etc.) writes of one such instance, "He would never lack for her affection, commitment, and respect, but she felt the part of her that had loved and been loved by the only man she could ever care for curl up in some remote, hidden corner of her being like an animal whose time has come to die." Cue the violins and tears, as Meacham's saga winds slowly to a foreseeable but satisfying conclusion. A suitably long and intermittently engaging descendant of such Southern-fried epics as Gone with the Wind and Giant—just the thing for genre fans with time to spare.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Early in the story, an elderly Mary Toliver contemplates the changes that have taken place in the community she’s lived in all her life: Sassie now refers to “dinner” as “lunch” (37), the Toliver mansion has been outfitted with modern conveniences. Yet “the antebellum grace of the avenue remained the same, a small part of the South not yet gone with the wind” (38). How do these surface observations set the tone for the deep traditions and powerful changes that are described throughout the story? What things in your home (or community or family) have changed over time, and what has stayed the same?

2. When a desperate young Mary tries to find solace in the mother who has seemingly turned her back on both her daughter and her late husband, Darla replies, “You ask me what else he could have done.... He could have loved me more than he loved his land. That’s what he could have done” (55). This is the first of many times that we see bitterness over a loved one choosing Somerset above all else. What do you think it was about the land that was worth so much for so long, until Mary’s death?

3. From a young age, Mary is stubborn and headstrong, believing that she knows without a shadow of a doubt what is best for herself, her family, and Somerset. In a heated argument with Percy Warwick, she declares, “What none of you can see is that I am honor bound to carry out my father’s wishes.... I would never marry a man who didn’t understand and support my feelings for Somerset” (60). What is it besides the confidence of youth that gives Mary such conviction? Have you ever been similarly completely sure of something, only to realize later that you were wrong?

4. Amos Hines (and many others over the years) is shocked and skeptical when he reads of the Toliver curse: that any owner of Somerset will never have more than one heir. Mary was convinced of the curse’s reality by the end of her life, but what are other, more credible downsides to owning this particular piece of land? Is the curse truly specific to Tolivers?

5. Mary is positive that Lucy Gentry, despite her devotion to him, could never be the kind of woman that Percy could care for, yet Mary is truly taken by surprise when Percy tells her he plans to marry no one but her. How is it possible that she could have been so perceptive of his desires (and her own) on one count, yet completely blind on another?

6. Lucy insists to her roommate that she can be with Percy, saying, “My love for him will blind him” (90). Later she pushes herself into the Warwick household, determined to spend as much time with Percy as possible. Can such relentlessness and aggression work in the realm of love (keep in mind that Percy uses a similar tactic when he bargains with Mary to test whether they can live without one another)? How would you have dealt with such an unwanted visitor in your home if you were Percy’s mother?

7. Percy admits to Mary, “I want to marry you because I love you. I’ve loved you all your life, ever since you smiled at me through your cradle bars. I’ve never considered marrying anyone else (115). He’s taken the concept of love at first sight to a new level—is it really possible to love someone the way he has, for your entire life?

8. Think about how promises play out in the novel: Rachel’s promise to her late father to care for Somerset, Ollie’s promise to Mary that he’ll protect Percy, and Percy’s being left with a commission from Mary to keep Somerset out of Rachel’s hands are just a few of the pledges that are key to the story. What others are there? When were they beneficial, and when are they destructive?

9. When Mary complains that Miles has abandoned the Toliver family for Paris, Percy points out that “Miles has the same right to his choices as you to do yours” (148). At what point (if ever?) does individual happiness come before family obligation? How would Mary (at a young age and at an older age), Percy, Miles, and Rachel each answer that question?

10. Emmitt Waithe is disturbed by Mary’s desire to expand her farm with Fair Acres, saying, “This is not about vision. This is about blind desire that falls short of greed only because you love the land.... It’s your pride pushing you to buy Fair Acres” (170). Is he correct? What distinction, if any, is there between Mary’s desire to do right by her family and her desire to find satisfaction for herself?

11. “Apprehension and fatigue were her constant companions. Worry went to bed with her at night and awoke with her in the morning” (180). Why does Mary keep at this unrelenting, thankless farm work, particularly as Percy spends time with other women? What are her drives, and what are his?

12. Compounding the horror of Darla's suicide are the pink ribbons she left behind, the memory of which “writhed between [Mary and Percy] like a poisonous snake” (197). Roses and the colors pink, red, and white all have major significance in the story. What kind of symbolism to we ascribe to objects and their colors today? Why do you think that those objects that represent emotions are so important and powerful?

13. Throughout the ups and downs of their relationship, Percy is steadfast in his knowledge that they are meant to be together, while Mary—just as certain at every moment—
wavers: “It was inevitable that she and Percy would clash...steel against steel” (207); “This was love, she thought.... They would work out their differences. They needed each other” (213); “I am Somerset....To separate me from the plantation is to have half of me. I would not be the same. I’m convinced of that now” (236). Why is it so difficult for Mary to understand what she “knows,” only to realize, in the end, that she has made a mistake?

14. Had Mary and Percy married after all, do you think that their relationship would have worked out in the end?

15. Percy marries Lucy after he accepts that Mary is gone, but the new husband and wife realize they have made a grave misstep. “He’d married her knowing it was the idol she loved and not the man” (296). When have you gotten what you most wanted, only to realize that it wasn’t at all what you’d expected?

16. Wyatt’s teacher realizes that the boy picks on Matthew because he is lonely. Later, when Lucy realizes that Matthew is Percy’s son, she realizes that all this time, her husband has been lonely. Why were father and son, both such lonely figures, unable to find a bond until the end of Matthew’s life? How does this relationship compare to the other parent/child connections (or lack of) in the story?

17. So many of the conflicts in Roses arise from traditions: keeping Somerset in the Toliver family above all else leads to a host of problems, the impossibility of financial aid among the Toliver, Warwick, and DuMont families drives Mary and Percy to commit fraud, and everything repeats itself again with Rachel and Matt’s generation until Mary’s codicil ends the lock on Somerset. What place do traditions have in your life, and how do they help or hinder you in your endeavors?

18. Discussing all the troubles that have arisen from their decisions, Mary and Percy are distraught about what they are responsible for until Percy suggests, “Maybe we should begin by forgiving ourselves for the pain we’ve caused” (363). At what point does one have to shift from atoning for the past, and look to moving into the future with a clear conscience?

19. Both Mary’s mother Darla and Rachel’s mother Alice have rifts between themselves and their daughters caused by Somerset. How are the two mothers the same, and how are they different? What were the two daughters’ reactions to their distant mothers?

20. “So the difference, Rachel, is that your father would look upon the proceeds of the sale of Aunt Mary’s property as compensation. He’d consider it charity to share in the profits of what he ran away from” (429). Is this legitimate reasoning? Do you think that William would agree with his wife’s assertions about his perceptions?

21. Should Mary have revealed the necessary fraud she had to undertake to the nephew that she inadvertently insulted? Should she have warned Rachel of the power of Somerset before cultivating her grand-niece’s passion for farming? What knowledge does the older generation owe its heirs, and when should that knowledge be passed down?

22. Did Mary really “save” Rachel, as she told Amos at the beginning of the story?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Rosie Project
Graeme Simsion, 2013
Simon & Schuster
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476729091

Summary
Meet Don Tillman, a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers.

Rosie Jarman is all these things. She also is strangely beguiling, fiery, and intelligent. And while Don quickly disqualifies her as a candidate for the Wife Project, as a DNA expert Don is particularly suited to help Rosie on her own quest: identifying her biological father.

When an unlikely relationship develops as they collaborate on the Father Project, Don is forced to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that, despite your best scientific efforts, you don’t find love, it finds you.

Arrestingly endearing and entirely unconventional, Graeme Simsion’s distinctive debut will resonate with anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of great challenges. The Rosie Project is a rare find: a book that restores our optimism in the power of human connection. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956-57
• Where—Auckland, New Zealand
• Education—B.S, Monash University; M.B.A., Deakin University;
Ph.D., University of Melbourne; Advanced Diploma, Screen-
writing, RMIT*
• Awards—Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award
• Currently—lives in Fitzroy, Victoria, Australia

Graeme C. Simsion is a New Zealand born Australian author, screen-writer, playwright and data modeller. He won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award for his book, The Rosie Project.

Prior to writing fiction he was an information systems consultant and wrote two books and several papers about data-modelling. He established a consulting business in 1982 and sold it in 1999. At that time Simsion Bowles and Associates had over seventy staff. He co-founded a wine distribution business, Pinot Now with Steven Naughton.

From 2002-2006, as a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, he conducted the largest published study of data modeling practitioners (489 participants, most with substantial industry experience), to address the question, Is data modeling better characterized as description or design? The research included interviews with thought leaders, surveys of practitioners, and practical modeling tasks.

He concluded that, in contrast to the assumption implicit in most data modeling research, data modeling is best characterized as a design discipline (the term design is used in the broad sense of design theory, rather than its more narrow and casual usage in the information systems field). His work was published as his PhD thesis "Data Modeling: Description or Design," University of Melbourne, 2006 and in Data Modeling Theory and Practice (Technics Publications, 2007).

He is married to Professor Anne Buist and has two children. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/03/2013.)

* RMIT is the renamed Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology

Book Reviews
The Rosie Project is the kind of Panglossian comedy in which everything is foreordained to work out for the best. That’s not a genre that can be dismissed entirely—at least not without sacrificing P. G. Wodehouse, which no one should be prepared to do—but it’s one that doesn’t comfortably accommodate things like autism spectrum disorders.... The ultimate convention of romantic comedy is that love conquers all, but to propose that it can so easily mitigate such a painful condition may be to take convention too far.
Gabriel Roth - New York Times Book Review

Read-out-loud laughter begins by page two in Simsion’s debut novel about a 39-year-old genetics professor with Asperger’s—but utterly unaware of it—looking to... find love.... His plans take a backseat when he meets Rosie, a bartender who wants him to help her determine her birth father’s identity.
Publishers Weekly

Funny, touching, and hard to put down, The Rosie Project is certain to entertain even as readers delve into deep themes. For a book about a logic-based quest for love, it has a lot of heart….[an] immensely enjoyable novel.
Booklist

Polished debut fiction, from Australian author Simsion, about a brilliant but emotionally challenged geneticist who develops a questionnaire to screen potential mates but finds love instead.... The story lurches from one set piece of deadpan nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor to another: We laugh at, and with, Don as he tries to navigate our hopelessly emotional, nonliteral world....sparkling.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Do Don’s Asperger’s conditions help him or hinder him? Does Don’s having Autism offer any advantages in his life?

2. Don goes through a number of spectacularly bad dates. What have been some of your own dating nightmares?

3. Where do you fall on the spectrum between structure and chaos in life? Are you highly rigid in your routines or very relaxed?

4. Do you agree with Don’s assessment that “humans often fail to see what is close to them and obvious to others”? (p. 88)

5. What do you think of Gene and Claudia’s relationship? Do you know anyone in an open marriage? Can it work?

6. Don says that the happiest day of his life was spent at the Museum of Natural History. Do you have a happiest day of your life? Or is there a special place where you are happiest?

7. As Don’s affection for Rosie grows, he becomes aware of his instincts overriding reason. What is the role of instinct versus reason when it comes to choosing a life partner?

8. Do you have anyone on the Autism spectrum in your life?

9. Don watches a number of movies to try to learn about romance, including When Harry Met Sally, The Bridges of Madison County, An Affair to Remember, and Hitch. What are your top five romantic movies?

10. Have you ever had a moment of breaking out of your routine and opening up in a significant way? Or has someone broken through your routine for you?

11. Is it smart to have a list of criteria for a potential partner or is it limiting?

12. Don gets in trouble with the dean for using the genetics lab for his personal project with Rosie. Is it ever okay to break the rules in order to help someone?

13. Do you feel happy for Don when he “eliminates a number of unconventional mannerisms” (p. 268) in order to win Rosie, or has he lost something?

14. Does Gene get his comeuppance?

15. Were you surprised at the ultimate revelation of Rosie’s biological father? Did you suspect someone else?
(Questions 1-15 issued by publisher.)

Additional Questions by LitLovers

16. After his lecture on Aspergers, Don confronts Julie with what he considers her lack of understanding: earlier, she obliquely refereed to Aspergers as a "fault"—as in "[it's] something you're born with. It's nobody's fault." She also worries that the nickname "Aspies" will get "them thinking it's some sort of club." How do Don and Julie view Aspergers? Do you agree with Don's approach...or Julie's?

17. Follow-up to Question 12: Don comes to see that morality and ethics are nuanced. What brings him to this point? And is morality nuanced? Is there such a thing as a purely moral/ethical stance, as Don has, up to this point, always believed?

18. Don accuses Gene of being just like him. One would hardly consider Gene autistic, so what does Don mean? In what way are the two men similar?

19. SPOILER ALERT: Don comes to the realization that he loves Rosie. Does he? Is he capable of the same kind of love as those of us feel who are low on the autism spectrum? Don realizes he feels happiness with her...is that the same as love? Or is his concept of love—compatibility and pleasure in each other's company—a better basis for marriage than deep feelings? Will Don's love, or his idea of love, be satisfying for Rosie over the long haul? What do you think?

20. SPOILER ALERT: Follow up to Question 17: Don has autism. How would you rate the chances for a happy marriage between Don and Rosie? What problems might they encounter? Is the book's ending overly optimistic, too much like a fairytale? Or is the ending based on optimism tinged with realism?

21. Overall, talk about the changes that Rosie precipitates in Don? In some ways, this novel can be seen as an adult coming-of-age story. How does Don grow over the course of the novel...not just the changes in his appearance or social behavior but in his essentials?

(Questions 16-21 by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks!)

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