The Mothers
Brit Bennett, 2016
Penguin Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399184512
Summary
Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, Brit Bennett's mesmerizing first novel is an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition.
It begins with a secret.
"All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season."
It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor's son. Luke Sheppard is twenty-one, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it's not serious.
But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance—and the subsequent cover-up—will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly.
Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully maneuver, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.
In entrancing, lyrical prose, The Mothers asks whether a "what if" can be more powerful than an experience itself. If, as time passes, we must always live in servitude to the decisions of our younger selves, to the communities that have parented us, and to the decisions we make that shape our lives forever. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1989-90
• Raised—Oceanside, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in Encino, California
Brit Bennett is an American author whose debut novel, The Mothers, was published in 2016. The novel is a coming-of-age story surrounding a trio of black teens growing up in southern California.
Bennett grew up in Oceanside in southern California. She is the youngest of three sisters. Their father was Oceanside's first black city attorney, and their mother a finger-print analyst for the country sheriff's department.
Bennett recalls herself as a serious, driven child, who started writing when she was 7 or 8. Her efforts resulted in a play about a coyote and short story about a Native American boy whose home is destroyed.
While she was only 17, she began writing The Mothers—she was the same age as the book's protagonist, Nadia Turner. Like Nadia, Bennett was smart and ambitious and eager to get out of the city where she grew up.
My mom grew up sharecropping in Louisiana, and my dad grew up in South Central L.A., and both of them were able to scratch and claw and go to college, so what’s my excuse?
Bennett did leave town. She attended Stanford University, where she received her B.A. in English. Later, she earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan. Bennett says she felt out of place in Michigan—she was a southern California girl suffering through Midwestern winters and wrestling with the culture shock of being in a mostly white environment.
At the time that Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, were killed at the hands of the police, Bennett was completing a writing fellowship at Michigan. Not long after the court cases absolved the policemen involved in the killings, Bennett wrote an essay for the webwite Jezebel, entitled "I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People."
The essay was viewed more than 1 million times in 3 days and drew the attention of a literary agent who emailed her wanting to know if Bennett wanted to write a book. The rest is history. (Adapted from a New York Times article.)
Book Reviews
The Mothers is a lush book, a book of so many secrets, betrayals and reckonings that to spill them in the lines of a review instead of letting them play out as the author intended would be silly. Instead I will tell you this: Despite Bennett’s thrumming plot, despite the snap of her pacing, it’s the always deepening complexity of her characters that provides the book’s urgency. Bennett’s ability to unwind them gently, offering insights both shocking and revelatory, has a striking effect. I found myself reading not to find out what happens to the characters, but to find out who they are.
Mira Jacob - New York Times
[B]rilliant...a trio of young people coming of age under the shadow of harsh circumstances in a black community in Southern California. Deftly juggling multiple issues, Bennett addresses the subjects—abortion, infidelity, religious faith, and hypocrisy, race—head-on.... [E]xquisitely developed.
Publishers Weekly
In a contemporary black community in Southern California, 17-year-old Nadia Turner and 21-year-old Luke Sheppard launch a soulful affair.... [T]he decisions they make when Nadia becomes pregnant will reverberate throughout their lives..
Library Journal
The tangled destinies of three kids growing up in a tightknit African-American community in Southern California.... Far from reliably offering love, protection, and care, in this book, the mothers cause all the trouble. A wise and sad coming-of-age story showing how people are shaped by their losses.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. To what degree do you think Nadia's discomfort about her ambition is just in her head, and to what degree do you think her community sees her as an outsider because of it? Why is leaving home so revolutionary for Nadia? What can her academic accomplishments give her that her home community cannot?
2.Nadia and Luke are two black teen who go to a mostly white school, on the edge of a military base. When Luck ends up in the hospital, he becomes conscious of how Hispanic male nurse suffers from others’ stereotypes. How does the author approach identity in relation to race? How must Nadia change the way she interacts with people inside or outside of her community?
3. The Mothers strives to handle teen pregnancy with compassion and wisdom, portraying it as a life-transforming experience with incalculable ramifications. Why do you think Nadia makes the choices she does? How do these choices affect her life, Luke’s life, and even the larger community?
4.After his football injury, Luke must struggle to redefine his own sense of himself, his potential and expectations. Later in the book he befriends a male physical therapist who shows Luke that he, too, has the potential for ministering to the sick or injured—which is a sort of “mothering” in itself. How does Luke’s sense of masculinity change, before and after his injury? How does the author explore masculinity in the depiction of Nadia’s father, a professional military man who must learn to connect with his daughter? Do you think that, in the end, both father and daughter have found a way to communicate and show their love to each other?
5. The novel has a distinct nucleus, made up of “The Mothers,” the elderly women of the black church community who watch over the small-town goings-on with a presence that evokes the tone of a fable. Their chorus, Greek in format, shows the insularity and defiance of a small, loving community. How do “The Mothers” embody their community? In what ways do they impose their own experiences—their beliefs, their upbringings, their age—on the younger generation?
6. Another focus of the book is Nadia’s relationship with her best friend, Aubrey, as they help each other through adolescence and motherlessness. It provides poignant commentary about the ways women rely on one another, and about the necessity of navigating hard truths with the people we love. How do Nadia and Aubrey change over the course of the book—both within their friendship and outside of it? What does this friendship give each of the girls?
7. As Nadia maneuvers the adolescent world and beyond, how does her grief over her mother's death change her? Do you think it ultimately strengthens her? Weakens her?
(Questions adapted from the publisher's Teacher's Guide.)
A Gambler's Anatomy
Jonathan Lethem, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385539906
Summary
The author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a devilishly entertaining novel about an international backgammon hustler who thinks he's psychic. Too bad about the tumor in his face.
Handsome, impeccably tuxedoed Bruno Alexander travels the world winning large sums of money from amateur "whales" who think they can challenge his peerless acumen at backgammon.
Fronted by his pasty, vampiric manager, Edgar Falk, Bruno arrives in Berlin after a troubling run of bad luck in Singapore.
Perhaps it was the chance encounter with his crass childhood acquaintance Keith Stolarsky and his smoldering girlfriend Tira Harpaz. Or perhaps it was the emergence of a blot that distorts his vision so he has to look at the board sideways.
Things don't go much better in Berlin. Bruno's flirtation with Madchen, the striking blonde he meets on the ferry, is inconclusive; the game at the unsettling Herr Kohler's mansion goes awry as his blot grows worse; he passes out and is sent to the local hospital, where he is given an extremely depressing diagnosis.
Having run through Falk's money, Bruno turns to Stolarsky, who, for reasons of his own, agrees to fly Bruno to Berkeley, and to pay for the experimental surgery that might save his life.Berkeley, where Bruno discovered his psychic abilities, and to which he vowed never to return.
Amidst the patchouli flashbacks and Anarchist gambits of the local scene, between Tira's come-ons and Keith's machinations, Bruno confronts two existential questions: Is the gambler being played by life? And what if you're telepathic but it doesn't do you any good? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 19, 1964
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—Bennington College (no degree)
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award; World Fantasy
Award; Macallan Gold Dagger Award
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Jonathan Allen Lethem is an American novelist, essayist and short story writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. It was followed by three more science fiction novels. In 1999, Lethem published Motherless Brooklyn, a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published The Fortress of Solitude, which became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Early life
Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family that originated in Germany, Poland, and Russia. His brother Blake became an artist, and his sister Mara became a photographer and writer.
The family lived in a commune in the pre-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood of North Gowanus (now called Boerum Hill). Despite the racial tensions and conflicts, he later described his bohemian childhood as "thrilling" and culturally wide-reaching. He gained an encyclopedic knowledge of the music of Bob Dylan, saw Star Wars twenty-one times during its original theatrical release, and read the complete works of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Lethem later said Dick’s work was "as formative an influence as marijuana or punk rock—as equally responsible for beautifully fucking up my life, for bending it irreversibly along a course I still travel."
His parents divorced when Lethem was young. When he was thirteen, his mother Judith died from a malignant brain tumor, an event which he has said haunted him and has strongly affected his writing. (Lethem discusses the direct relation between his mother and the Bob Dylan song "Like a Rolling Stone" in the 2003 Canadian documentary Complete Unknown.) In 2007, Lethem explained, "My books all have this giant, howling missing [center]—language has disappeared, or someone has vanished, or memory has gone."
Intending to become a visual artist like his father, Lethem attended the High School of Music & Art in New York, where he painted in a style he describes as "glib, show-offy, usually cartoonish." At Music & Art he produced his own zine, The Literary Exchange, which featured artwork and writing. He also created animated films and wrote a 125-page novel, Heroes, still unpublished.
After graduating from high school, Lethem entered Bennington College in Vermont in 1982 as a prospective art student. At Bennington, Lethem experienced an "overwhelming....collision with the realities of class—my parents’ bohemian milieu had kept me from understanding, even a little, that we were poor.... [A]t Bennington that was all demolished by an encounter with the fact of real privilege." This, coupled with the realization that he was more interested in writing than art, led Lethem to drop out halfway through his sophomore year.
He hitchhiked from Denver, Colorado, to Berkeley, California, in 1984, across "a thousand miles of desert and mountains through Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, with about 40 dollars in my pocket," describing it as "one of the stupidest and most memorable things I've ever done." He lived in California for twelve years, working as a clerk in used bookstores, including Moe's and Pegasus & Pendragon Books, and writing on his own time. Lethem published his first short story in 1989 and published several more in the early 1990s.
First novels
Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons. The novel was published in 1994 to little initial fanfare, but an enthusiastic review in Newsweek, which declared Gun an "audaciously assured first novel," catapulted the book to wider commercial success. It became a finalist for the 1994 Nebula Award. In the mid-1990s, film producer-director Alan J. Pakula optioned the novel's movie rights, which allowed Lethem to quit working in bookstores and devote his time to writing.
His next several books include Amnesia Moon (1995), partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country; The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye (1996), a collection of short stories; As She Climbed Across the Table (1997) about a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack."
Lethem moved returned to Brooklyn in 1996, after which he published Girl in Landscape (1998) about a world populated by aliens but "very strongly influenced" by the 1956 John Wayne Western The Searchers, a movie with which Lethem is "obsessed."
In 1999, he released Motherless Brooklyn, a return to the detective theme, with a protagonist suffering from Tourette syndrome and obsessed with language. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, The Macallan Gold Dagger for crime fiction, and the Salon Book Award, and was named book of the year by Esquire.According to the New York Times, the mainstream success of Motherless Brooklyn made Lethem "something of a hipster celebrity," and he was referred to several times as a "genre bender." Lev Grossman of Time classed Lethem with a movement of authors similarly eager to blend literary and popular writing, including Michael Chabon (with whom Lethem is friends), Margaret Atwood, and Susanna Clarke.
In the early 2000s, Lethem published a story collection, edited two anthologies, wrote magazine pieces, and published the 55-page novella This Shape We're In (2000)—one of the first offerings from McSweeney's Books, the publishing imprint that developed from Dave Eggers' McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.
In November 2000, Lethem said that he was working on an uncharacteristically "big sprawling" novel, about a child who grows up to be a rock journalist. The novel was published in 2003 as The Fortress of Solitude. The semi-autobiographical bildungsroman features a tale of racial tensions and boyhood in Brooklyn during the late 1970s.
Lethem's second collection of short fiction, Men and Cartoons, was published in late 2004. In a 2009 interview with Armchair/Shotgun, Lethem said of short fiction:
I'm writing short stories right now, that's what I do between novels, and I love them. I'm very devoted to it.... [T]he story collections I've published are tremendously important to me. And many of the uncollected stories—or yet-to-be-collected stories—are among my proudest writings. They're very closely allied, obviously, to novel writing. But also very distinct..
In 2005 Lethem released The Disappointment Artist, his first collection of essays, and in the same year he received a MacArthur Fellowship.Mid-career novels
After Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem decided it "was time to leave Brooklyn in a literary sense anyway... I really needed to defy all that stuff about place and memory." In 2007, he returned—as a novelist—to California, where some of his earlier fiction had been set, with You Don't Love Me Yet, a novel about an upstart rock band. The novel received mixed reviews.
In early 2009, Lethem published Chronic City, set on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The author claimed it was strongly influenced by Saul Bellow, Philip K. Dick, Charles G. Finney. and Hitchcock’s Vertigo and referred to it as "long and strange."
Lethem's next novel, Dissident Gardens, was in 2013. According to Lethem in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the novel concerns "American leftists," very specifically "a red-diaper baby generation trying to figure out what it all means, this legacy of American Communism." He considers it "another New York neighborhood book, very much about the life of the city.... [W]riting about Greenwich Village in 1958 was really a jump for me...as much of an imaginative leap as any of the more fantastical things I've done."
Personal life
In 1987, Lethem married the writer and artist Shelley Jackson; they were divorced by 1997. In 2000, he married Julia Rosenberg, a Canadian film executive; they divorced two years later.
Lethem's current wife is filmmaker Amy Barrett; the couple has a son. Lethem has relocated to Los Angeles, California, where he is the Disney Professor of Writing at Pomona College in Claremont. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/17/2013.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Lethem's backgammon writing has a satisfying crunch. It's witty and sexy, too. I'm not sure I've ever before read a love scene that begins with a woman crying out, "Double me, gammon me"…. This novel is a tragicomedy; it plays at its best like a Twilight Zone episode filmed by the Coen brothers…. Mr. Lethem has a touching sense of the lives of obsessive misfits. They're his tribe. In Bruno he has given us a knight errant, a casually chivalrous wanderer in search of his place on earth.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
There are probably a dozen novelists whose new books, every one, I'm predisposed to read. Jonathan Lethem is one of them. I like his fundamental literary ratios—plot-to-pensées, comedy-to-tragedy—and the prose is a pleasure, lucid sentences that swerve and surprise without being show-offy…. Unlike The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City, both sprawling books that plainly aspired to be Great American Novels, [A Gambler's Anatomy] is middle-aged in the best sense: relaxed, happy to be its impeccable, focused, antic but Weltschmerz-y self, slightly old-fashioned but in no way "postmodern." Lethem has said that after ending his youthful sci-fi phase and becoming a certified big deal, he felt pressure to "'stay major!'…to only write books as long, sorrowful and wide-screen as The Fortress of Solitude," but that he chose instead to write "other kinds of books." A Gambler's Anatomy is the best so far of those other kinds of books.
Kurt Andersen - New York Times Book Review
In his new novel, he seems to be channeling (and, as usual, transforming) both Thomas Pynchon and Ian Fleming...in short, just another day in Lethemland, as strange and wondrous in its way as anyplace imagined by L. Frank Baum.
Chicago Tribune
A Gambler’s Anatomy will lead more than one reader to rummage around in the back of their closet (or local toy store) for a backgammon set…mesmerizing, twisty, fearless.
San Francisco Chronicle
[T]he zaniness in Lethem’s new novel is tangential rather than central, highlighting episodes, not imbuing the whole proceedings.... [The] outlandishness can be extremely funny.... [T]he most successful part of the novel [in Berkeley] is an effortless blend of comic hijinks and madcap tragedy...propelled by sharp description and slick dialogue.... Lethem serves up a punchy, stylish, relentlessly entertaining novel which, during quieter moments, asks us to consider whether we make our own luck and how best to deal with what life throws at us
Malcolm Forbes - Minneapolis Star Tribune
[P]leasantly bizarre.... Though inventive and well crafted, the novel neither fully endears its characters to the reader nor establishes narrative momentum, playing at themes and romantic entanglements that are expertly introduced but often under-explored and discarded.
Publishers Weekly
International backgammon hustler Bruno Alexander is down on his luck, perhaps owing to a blot distorting his vision.... Once more, National Book Critics Circle award winner Lethem makes the weird real, normal, and entertaining.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) [A] romp in which history, both personal and collective, can't help but assert itself..... Lethem takes real pleasure in the language and writes with a sense of the absurd that illuminates his situations and his characters.... In this tragicomic novel, nothing is ever exactly as it seems.
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.)
Library of Souls (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children Series, 3)
Ransom Riggs, 2016
Quirk Publishing
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594747588
Summary
The adventure that began with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and continued in Hollow City comes to a thrilling conclusion with Library of Souls.
As the story opens, sixteen-year-old Jacob discovers a powerful new ability, and soon he’s diving through history to rescue his peculiar companions from a heavily guarded fortress.
Accompanying Jacob on his journey are Emma Bloom, a girl with fire at her fingertips, and Addison MacHenry, a dog with a nose for sniffing out lost children.
They’ll travel from modern-day London to the labyrinthine alleys of Devil’s Acre, the most wretched slum in all of Victorian England. It’s a place where the fate of peculiar children everywhere will be decided once and for all.
Like its predecessors, Library of Souls blends thrilling fantasy with never-before-published vintage photography to create a one-of-a-kind reading experience. (From the publisher.)
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011) is the first book in the Peculiar Children Series. Hollow City (2014) is the second, and this book, Library of Souls (2016), is the third.
Tim Burton's film adaption of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was released in 2016. It stars Eva Green and Asa Butterfield.
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Englewood, Florida, USA
• Education—B.A., Kenyon College; M.A., University of Southern California
• Currently—lives in Santa Monica, California
In his words:
Hi, I'm Ransom, and I like to tell stories. Sometimes I tell them with words, sometimes with pictures, often with both.
I grew up on a farm on the Eastern shore of Maryland and also in a little house by the beach in Englewood, Florida where I got very tan and swam every day until I became half fish. I started writing stories when I was young, on an old typewriter that jammed and longhand on legal pads.
When I was a little older I got a camera for Christmas and became obsessed with photography, and when I was a little older still my friends and I came into possession of a half-broken video camera and began to make our own movies, starring ourselves, using our bedrooms and backyards for sets.
I have loved writing stories and taking photographs and making movies ever since, and have endeavored to do all three.
Education and early career
After high school I went to Kenyon College, a very pretty and quite old by American standards college in rural Ohio, where I studied literature and got a degree in English. Then I fulfilled a long-held dream and went to film school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
I'd been making films since the backyard-masterpiece days of my childhood, but at USC I learned how to make them bigger and better and shiny-looking. I graduated with what I thought was a pretty slick thesis film under my arm and went out into the world to conquer the film festival circuit and then Hollywood—or at least that was the plan, though it didn't quite work out that way. I spent a few years writing scripts and taking meetings and getting not very far, trying any way I could to get noticed.
All the while I was writing: for five years I had a gig as a daily blogger for mentalfloss.com, and I also wrote for their magazine, contributed to a few books they published through Harpercollins, and wrote for a couple of other publications here and there, as well.
Books
All of which turned into an opportunity to do some work for a small publisher who knew my editors at mentalfloss. That was Quirk Books, who asked me if I was interested in writing a book about Sherlock Holmes for them. I jumped at the opportunity. That was The Sherlock Holmes Handbook (2009).
Next came Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, born out of my love for vintage photography and bizarro stories, and I never looked back.
I still love movies and I still make short films (here are some recent ones) and one day I will make a feature—when the time and the material are right. These days, though, I'm loving being a novelist, a photo collector, and an occasional short filmmaker.
Personal
I live near Los Angeles, California, with my wife, the lovely and talented Tahereh Mafi—who is also a writer, and if you haven't read her lovely and exciting Shatter Me books you're missing out—and we type and travel and drink tea together and it's really quite wonderful. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Fans of the trilogy’s first two books will enjoy Library of Souls for its unique world, fast action, satisfying answers and a thorough tying up of loose ends.
Free Lance-Star
I was blown away by the way the haunting photographs were woven so seamlessly into the incredible plot. And Library of Souls has simply the most perfect ending.
Nikki - Justine Magazine
Oh, my birds, I love this book! I’m obsessed with Ransom Riggs’ wildly creative world packed with heroic, heartwarming characters, supper baddies, and incredible settings like Devil’s Acre and the Library of Souls.
Annalyse - Justine Magazine
Library of Souls will not disappoint.
Forces of Geek
The challenge Riggs faces in Library of Souls is to match the remarkably high standard set by the first two books in the series, either the mind-bending bafflements of the first book or the edge-of-your-seat action of the second. Riggs succeeds, delivering a thrilling conclusion to Jacob’s trilogy.
Paste Magazine
[T]hrilling and satisfying.... [C]haracters, their relationships, and their special abilities help to inform the world-building, and the detailed descriptions set the tone...from humorous to suspenseful to downright terrifying (Gr. 8 & Up). —Billy Parrott, New York Public Library
School 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)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
The Perfect Son
Barbara Claypole White, 2015
Lake Union Publishing
386 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781477830048
Summary
From a distance, Felix Fitzwilliam, the son of an old English family, is a good husband and father.
But, obsessed with order and routine, he’s a prisoner to perfection. Disengaged from the emotional life of his North Carolina family, Felix has let his wife, Ella, deal with their special-needs son by herself.
A talented jewelry designer turned full-time mother, Ella is the family rock…until her heart attack shatters their carefully structured existence. Now Harry, a gifted teen grappling with the chaos of Tourette’s syndrome, confronts a world outside his parents’ control, one that tests his desire for independence.
As Harry searches for his future, and Ella adapts to the limits of her failing health, Felix struggles with his past and present roles. To prevent the family from being ripped apart, they must each bend with the inevitability of change and reinforce the ties that bind. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Turvey, Bedfordshire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., York University
• Awards—Golden Quill's First Book Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, USA
English born and educated, Barbara Claypole White is the author of five novels. She lives in North Carolina, in the U.S., with her family.
Barbara writes hopeful stories about troubled families with a healthy dose of mental illness. Much of her work has been inspired by her poet/musician son’s courageous battles against obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Her debut novel, The Unfinished Garden, won the 2013 Golden Quill Contest for Best First Book, and The In-Between Hour was chosen by SIBA (the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) as a Winter 2014 Okra Pick. Her third novel, The Perfect Son, was picked for Amazon’s Kindle First Program and became a Goodreads Choice Awards 2015 Nominee for Best Fiction. Echoes of Family, another darkly quirky tale, was published in 2016 (Adapted from Amazon and the author's website.)
Discussion Questions
1. No one in the novel is quite as he or she seems at first. Ella, for example, appears to be the perfect mother, but is filled with hidden doubts and insecurities; Felix appears to be a rigid control freak, and yet every decision he makes for the family pushes him beyond his comfort zone. As the story unfolds, did any of the other characters surprise you, and if so, in what ways? Do you agree that we are often too quick to pigeonhole a person based on one aspect of his or her personality?
2. Felix is a dark, unlikely hero. Even as Katherine warms to him, she calls him an antihero. How do you feel about Felix, and did those feelings change while you were reading the novel? Is Felix his own worst critic?
3. Were you shocked by Felix's flashback scene? Do you think we ever truly know what goes on in a family?
4. Harry does not have coprolalia—the involuntary and repetitive use of obscene language. Coprolalia is, however, the most common popular image of Tourette's, even though it affects only a small percentage of people with the syndrome. Do you agree that fictional characters struggling with neurological or mental disorders are often depicted using stereotypes? Do any of your family members battle an invisible disability, and if so, what have you found to be the most challenging part of explaining quirky behavior to the outside world?
5. When parenting a high-maintenance child, do the lines blur between being a helicopter parent and being a child advocate? Does Ella's health crisis speed up the natural process of separation and boundary setting that she and Harry must experience?
6. How do Harry's relationships with both his parents change during the novel?
7. How did you react to Ella's attempts to distance herself from Harry while she was in the hospital? What would you have done in her situation?
8. Harry and Max have a unique bond. What did you like most about their relationship? Do you think they will be BFFs forever, despite taking such different life paths?
9. What do you think is the emotional core of Ella and Felix's marriage? Are they well matched or an unlikely couple? Do you agree with Felix that the two months following the heart attack are a gift—a second chance for them?
10. In chapter one, Ella refers to the stranger sitting next to her as the good father, and throughout the novel, both she and Felix question what it means to be a good parent. What do you think it means? Do you agree with them that the hardest lesson of parenthood is learning to let go?
11. Do you have a favorite secondary character? If so, who and why?
12. One of the novel's themes is that a person can find clarity and empathy in a moment of unbearable darkness. Does the Fitzwilliam family crisis bring out the best in all the characters, including the secondary ones?
13. Ella's journey is a solitary one, whereas Felix is drawn increasingly into a community of support, something he's never experienced before. What do you think about that?
14. Why doesn't Ella die on the plane? Do you think she ever believed she would get better?
15. We see various settings in historic Durham, North Carolina, from Felix's perspective. What did you learn about Felix through the different settings—especially the scenes at Duke Gardens and the Nasher Museum of Art? Why do you think Felix, a Londoner who loves the afternoon sun, was drawn to a house hidden in shade at the edge of Duke Forest? Do you think Felix will stay in the house?
16. How did you react to the ending?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
The Intersect
Brad Graber, 2016
Dark Victory Press
460 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780997604207
Summary
Set against Arizona’s political and cultural vortex at the start of 2010, The Intersect explores the issues of the day by weaving together the lives of disparate characters striving to survive in a world where the strongest link, and most lasting connection, is made among strangers.
When Dave and Charlie relocate from the Bay Area to Phoenix, tensions ratchet up in their relationship as Charlie insists on buying a house on the grounds of the Arizona Biltmore as Dave contemplates leaving his job.
Daisy, a spry septuagenarian, shows up at their front door after a long convalescence, unaware that her greedy, Michigan relatives, Jack and Enid, have already sold her home. Charlie assumes the older woman is Dave’s distant aunt and happily ushers her into a guest room.
Meanwhile, across town, Anna, a gifted psychic who channels the dead, is concerned about her neighborhood. She hires a handyman to install motion-detectors, unaware that Ernie has entered the United States illegally from Mexico as a child.
When Henry, a homeless gay teen, attempts to rob Anna, Ernie intervenes and a melee ensues. The police mistakenly arrest Ernie, leading to his deportation. And so begins The Intersect as relationships unravel, secrets are revealed, love blossoms, and injustice leads to a thrilling climax. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York-Buffalo; M.H.A., Washington University
• Currently—lives in Phoenix, Arizona
Brad Graber was born and raised in New York City. He obtained a B.A. in Biology from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and an M.H.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
As a healthcare executive, Brad has held a number of management positions over the years. He’s lived in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago; West Bloomfield, a suburb of Detroit; and Mill Valley, a suburb of San Francisco. Brad currently resides in Phoenix on the grounds of the Arizona Biltmore with his long-term spouse and their dog Charlie.
Brad is formerly a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and Certified Medical Executive through Medical Group Management Association. He no longer works in healthcare though he does continue to actively volunteer with local non-profit organizations.
He is currently working with Duet, transporting seniors to their medical appointments. He also takes a blind senior grocery shopping every two weeks. The Intersect is Brad’s debut novel.
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
For additional reviews, see Amazon Customer reviews.
Beautifully told by Brad Graber...I found myself thinking that I was one of the characters and interacting with those around me. It was really only when I closed the book that I really realized that I had only been reading.
Reviews by Amos Lassen
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think the author named the novel The Intersect?
2. Were you surprised by the turn in Charlie and Dave’s relationship? What clues did the author provide along the way? What challenges do you think couples face as they go through a major life change? Do you think these stresses are experienced differently by gay and straight couples?
3. How did Charlie and Dave’s personality traits contribute to their relationship issues? Did you find it enlightening to have a glimpse into a gay relationship? Was there anything about that relationship which surprised you?
4. When Daisy breaks a hip, she finds herself struggling, afraid of becoming a permanent resident of a long-term care facility. What key factors make Daisy most vulnerable? How have her choices led to her present circumstances? How does she overcome these choices? Are there seniors living in your community who might be at-risk for experiences similar to Daisy’s? Are you aware of the support services that reach out to isolated seniors?
5. Jack and Enid are new to Arizona. How are the tensions in their marriage manifested in their relationship? Are these tensions the same for Charlie and Dave? What is the difference between these two couples and how they approach life together?
6. Jack struggles to see clearly what is happening to Daisy. How does this parallel his struggles? How do his experiences with Enid, Daisy, and Bonnie move his character along an arc of growth? Is Jack a victim or merely ignorant?
7. Bonnie has a pattern of failed relationships. What characteristics does she possess that explain her inability to connect? Do you think she’s like many women in their late-thirties who are career-driven and remain unmarried or in unattached relationships? What will it take to get Bonnie to make a commitment to a relationship?
8. Anna opens her heart to Henry, yet later in the novel, remains in Mexico with Ernie. Do you think she’s abandoned Henry? How can you explain this conflict in her character? Why does she remain unaware of Henry’s challenges?
9. There are clues throughout the novel about Ernie and his background. Did you catch them? Did you feel empathy for Ernie? Were you surprised by the final twist? What do you think the author is saying about undocumented immigrants who are raised in the United States?
10. The author shares the backstory on many of the characters in the novel. Whose backstory did you find the most compelling—Enid’s, Ernie’s, Daisy’s, or Jack’s childhood? How did their childhoods contribute to each character’s experience as an adult?
11. Henry struggles with his identity. Have you known a family that has trouble accepting their gay child? What about Henry’s struggle keeps him from sharing with Anna? What is it about Henry that makes him particularly vulnerable?
12. At the end of the novel, Charlie and Dave’s dynamic changes. Do you think it takes a trauma before we shift how we think about the direction of our own life?
13. Which character most closely touched your heart? Which character reminded you of someone in your own life? Which character would you have liked to learn more about?
14. The novel is set in Phoenix. What was your impression of Arizona before reading the book? Has that impression changed? Has the book made you want to visit Phoenix?
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