Alice I Have Been
Melanie Benjamin, 2010
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385344142
Summary
Part love story, part literary mystery, Melanie Benjamin’s spellbinding historical novel leads readers on an unforgettable journey down the rabbit hole, to tell the story of a woman whose own life became the stuff of legend.
Her name is Alice Liddell Hargreaves, but to the world she’ll always be known simply as “Alice,” the girl who followed the White Rabbit into a wonderland of Mad Hatters, Queens of Hearts, and Cheshire Cats. Now, nearing her eighty-first birthday, she looks back on a life of intense passion, great privilege, and greater tragedy. First as a young woman, then as a wife, mother, and widow, she’ll experience adventures the likes of which not even her fictional counterpart could have imagined.
Yet from glittering balls and royal romances to a world plunged into war, she’ll always be the same determined, undaunted Alice who, at ten years old, urged a shy, stuttering Oxford professor to write down one of his fanciful stories, thus changing her life forever. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Melanie Hauser
• Birth—November 24. 1962
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
• Education—Indiana University (Purdue University at
Indianapolis)
• Currently—lives near Chicago, Illinois
Melanie Benjamin is the pen name of American writer, Melanie Hauser (nee Miller). Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Melanie is one of three children. Her brother Michael Miller is a published non-fiction author and musician. Melanie attended Indiana University—Purdue University at Indianapolis then married Dennis Hauser in 1988; they presently reside in the Chicago, Illinois area with their two sons.
Early writing
As Melanie Hauser, she published short stories in the In Posse Review and The Adirondack Review. Her short story "Prodigy on Ice" won the 2001 "Now Hear This" short story competition that was part of a WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) program called Stories on Stage, where short stories were performed and broadcast.
When Melanie sold her first of two contemporary novels, she had to add Lynne to her name (Melanie Lynne Hauser) to distinguish her from the published sports journalist Melanie Hauser.
The first of Melanie's contemporary novels, Confessions of Super Mom was published in 2005; the sequel Super Mom Saves the World came out in 2007. In addition to her two contemporary novels, Melanie also contributed an essay to the anthology IT'S A BOY and maintained a popular mom blog called The Refrigerator Door.
Fictional biographies
Under the pen name Melanie Benjamin (a combination of her first name and her son's first name), she shifted genres to historical fiction. Her third novel, Alice I Have Been, was inspired by Alice Liddell Hargreaves's life (the real-life Alice of Alice in Wonderland). Published in 2010, Alice I Have Been was a national bestseller and reached the extended list of The New York Times Best Seller list.
In 2011, Benjamin fictionalized another historical female. Her novel The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb focuses on the life of Lavinia Warren Bump, a proportionate dwarf featured in P.T. Barnum's shows.
Her third fictionalized biography, The Aviator's Wife, was released in 2013 and centers on Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of famed aviator, Charles Lindberg. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Benjamin draws on one of the most enduring relationships in children's literature in her excellent debut, spinning out the heartbreaking story of Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Her research into the lives of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and the family of Alice Liddell is apparent as she takes circumstances shrouded in mystery and colors in the spaces to reveal a vibrant and passionate Alice. Born into a Victorian family of privilege, free-spirited Alice catches the attention of family friend Dodgson and serves as the muse for both his photography and writing. Their bond, however, is misunderstood by Alice's family, and though she is forced to sever their friendship, she is forever haunted by their connection as her life becomes something of a chain of heartbreaks. As an adult, Alice tries to escape her past, but it is only when she finally embraces it that she truly finds the happiness that eluded her. Focusing on three eras in Alice's life, Benjamin offers a finely wrought portrait of Alice that seamlessly blends fact with fiction. This is book club gold.
Publishers Weekly
In this historical novel about the real-life Alice in Alice in Wonderland, 80-year-old Alice Hargreaves looks back on three periods of her life: her Victorian childhood as the daughter of an Oxford don and the special friend of mathematics tutor Charles Dodgson, later known as Lewis Carroll; her young adult romance with Prince Leopold and its painful conclusion; and her marriage to country gentleman Reginald Hargreaves and the raising of their three sons, who eventually face the horrors of World War I. Throughout it all, Alice is burdened by her fictional identity and by having captivated the odd, stuttering Mr. Dodgson as a child. The jealousy and rumors caused by his intense fondness for Alice besmirch both their reputations for years to come. Verdict: Benjamin's novel imagines the truth behind the mystery of Lewis Carroll's relationship with his child muse, Alice Liddell. Although the shadow of inappropriateness always lingers, this is truly a love story, albeit one that could happily exist only in a fairy tale. This novel will have wide appeal as it includes history, romance, literature, and a great deal of suspense. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal
Benjamin's debut imagines Alice Liddell's experiences before and particularly after Lewis Carroll immortalized her. She was born in 1852, daughter of the dean of Christ Church College, Oxford; she died in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression. But Alice's life reached its literary apex in 1862, when on a summer afternoon Oxford mathematics don Charles Dodgson entertained the Liddell sisters with a tale of Alice falling down the rabbit's hole, later to be the inaugural event in his hugely successful book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This well-documented afternoon and the girl's charged relationship with Dodgson are described by the author as defining experiences for Alice, both magical and traumatic, overshadowing the subsequent 70 years. Benjamin's adult Alice grapples with a repressed memory; her one-dimensional Dodgson is a daydreaming, stuttering loser. The relationship offered here, that of a pedophile and his victim, is too predictable and simplistic; the sexual mores of Victorian England and of Dodgson himself were more complicated. The novel becomes richer and increasingly assured after the "break," when Dodgson is forbidden to see Alice again. She grows to maturity in Oxford's culturally privileged enclave, is wooed by Queen Victoria's son, Prince Leopold (barred from marrying her in part because of the unspoken, lingering scandal concerning Dodgson), then finally marries and bears three boys, two of them killed in World War I. In the end, this rigid Victorian lady, at a loss in the 20th century, recovers her memory and finally finds what her life has lacked—acceptance and self-love. Historical fiction hampered by a 21st-century perspective on Victorian values.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What social forces motivate each of the characters to deny Dodgson's inappropriate attention to Alice?
2. Alice became famous through no fault of her own. Can you come up with a modern day version of Alice? How do their lives compare?
3. Alice refuses to read Alice in Wonderland until she is well into her eighties. Why do you think she avoids reading the story she inspired?
4. The relationships between Alice and her sisters Ina and Edith range from rivalry to a life-long bond. What effects do these have on Alice, and what are the consequences?
5. What part of the book speaks to you and your experiences in life?
6. How does Benjamin take both the reader and Alice from ignorance and denial to the self-realization of her complicity in the ruptured friendship with Rev. Dodgson? Is this believable?
7. While Alice's sister lies dying, Mama asks Alice "Why couldn't it be you? You've never brought me anything but pain, while she has brought me nothing but joy." What kind of effect do you think this has on Alice for the rest of her life? Did it affect the way Alice thought of her own children?
8. The photos Lewis Carroll (or the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) took of Alice Liddell capture a look that can be described as wise beyond her years—what do you think is behind that look?
9. How much did the Victorian setting play a role in this book?
10. Before reading Benjamin's novel, had you already read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? If so, does it make you want to read it again? Why or why not?
11. What do you think of an author writing a biographical novel using only notes and references and filling in the gaps with intelligent supposition?
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The Bells
Richard Harvell, 2010
Crown Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307590534
Summary
The celebrated opera singer Lo Svizzero was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps where his mother served as the keeper of the loudest and most beautiful bells in the land. Shaped by the bells’ glorious music, as a boy he possessed an extraordinary gift for sound. But when his preternatural hearing was discovered—along with its power to expose the sins of the church—young Moses Froben was cast out of his village with only his ears to guide him in a world fraught with danger.
Rescued from certain death by two traveling monks, he finds refuge at the vast and powerful Abbey of St. Gall. There, his ears lead him through the ancient stone hallways and past the monks’ cells into the choir, where he aches to join the singers in their strange and enchanting song. Suddenly Moses knows his true gift, his purpose. Like his mother’s bells, he rings with sound and soon, he becomes the protégé of the Abbey’s brilliant yet repulsive choirmaster, Ulrich.
But it is this gift that will cause Moses’ greatest misfortune: determined to preserve his brilliant pupil’s voice, Ulrich has Moses castrated. Now a young man, he will forever sing with the exquisite voice of an angel—a musico—yet castration is an abomination in the Swiss Confederation, and so he must hide his shameful condition from his friends and even from the girl he has come to love. When his saviors are exiled and his beloved leaves St. Gall for an arranged marriage in Vienna, he decides he can deny the truth no longer and he follows her—to sumptuous Vienna, to the former monks who saved his life, to an apprenticeship at one of Europe’s greatest theaters, and to the premiere of one of history’s most beloved operas.
In this confessional letter to his son, Moses recounts how his gift for sound led him on an astonishing journey to Europe’s celebrated opera houses and reveals the secret that has long shadowed his fame: How did Moses Froben, world renowned musico, come to raise a son who by all rights he never could have sired?
Like the voice of Lo Svizzero, The Bells is a sublime debut novel that rings with passion, courage, and beauty. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 6, 1978
• Where—New Hampshire, USA
• Education—Dartmouth College
• Currently—lives in Basel, Switzerland
Richrd Harvell was born in the state of New Hampshire, USA, studied English literature at Dartmouth College. He now lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and children. The Bells is his first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Chronicling the journey of 18th-century singer Moses Froben from his Swiss village to Vienna, this debut novel strikes many melodramatic notes in an overwrought plot; squalor, beauty, horror, forbidden love, tragedy, and triumph splash broadly, sometimes artfully, but often with operatic excess. Moses, born to a deaf-mute in a belfry, possesses a unique bond to music. Cast from his home, he joins a choir, discovering that he can mold "that ocean of sound... into something beautiful." Harvell, however, shows his own limitations when he seeks to describe the resonance of music. When Moses says, "I wished I could dissolve into sound," the reader shares his frustration. A tormented choirmaster castrates Moses to preserve his beautiful voice, transforming him into a "musico," a soprano whose voice never deepens, and who will never be a man. His ability to sound like an angel brings him into contact with a wealthy family, sparking an impossible love affair with a beautiful but crippled woman. Moses's ardor impels him to Vienna and its vibrant opera scene, where his brief appearance on stage allows love to triumph before, unsurprisingly, tragedy brings down the curtain.
Publishers Weekly
Born in a belfry in the Uri Valley of the Swiss Alps, where his deaf-mute mother rang the Loudest Bells on Earth, Moses Froben...overcome[s] his humble origins to become Lo Suizzero, the musical toast of Europe in the eighteenth century.... Taking few liberties with history, Harvell has fashioned an engrossing first novel ringing with sounds; a musical and literary treat. —Michele Leber
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Harvell begins his novel with a letter from the narrator’s son Nicolai, in which we learn a great deal, including that Nicolai never knew his mother and that in 1806 Moses is a famous singer. How does this affect our experience of the novel? How would the novel be different with these two pages torn out?
2. Moses’ years at the Abbey of St. Gall are tumultuous and fraught with pain. But would you say he wishes Nicolai had never brought him there? What does he gain from the abbot and abbey? Aside from the obvious in his castration, what does he lose?
3. Moses calls Ulrich “the architect of my tragedy” (208). And yet, his life would have been so different had he never been castrated—we certainly would not be reading the story of this famous singer. Is his regret complete? Does he blame Ulrich? How would his life have been different had he not been castrated?
4. In an interview, Richard Harvell says, “I first planned Nicolai and Remus, as two cruel monks, and then, as I wrote, they just wouldn’t be mean, no matter what I tried. I had to make them good. I am very thankful for that.” Why are Remus and Nicolai so important to Moses’ story? Why do you think Harvell is so thankful that they are not ‘mean’?
5. “This is not magic,” Harvell writes (14). “He cannot hear through mountains or to the other side of the earth. This is merely selection. The selection of sounds, the dissection of sounds, is something he can do like no other. This his mother and her bells have gifted him.” How would you describe Moses extraordinary hearing ability? Is this magic? How does Moses’ hearing influence his destiny?
6. While Harvell uses many visual images in the book, there are many descriptive passages relying on sound. “The one-eyed idiot’s howling, the rattle of the coppers in the leper’s wooden bowl, the creak of the warped wagon wheel, the hissing of a black cat plucked of half its fur by some disease” (217). How does description through sound add to the novel?
7. Gaetano Guadagni is one of the many historical figures in the novel. Is he a villain, or is he, as he always claims to be, Moses’ “fratello” (brother)?
8. One reviewer claimed that The Bells “earns its operatic tone” (Kirkus Reviews). What might be meant by ‘operatic tone’? In what other ways is the novel like an opera?
9. The narration is told in the first person, by the mature Moses, but told through the eyes of a child and, later, a young castrato. How is the novel influenced by the two perspectives? When does it swerve toward one or the other?
10. “I promise you as your faithful witness,” Moses swears (page 14). But does Moses always tell the complete, unbiased truth? Here is one example when his bias leaks through: “In this village I was born (may it burn to the ground and be covered by an avalanche)” (page 6). Where else does this happen?
11. The novel is clearly inspired by the Orpheus myth. How is Moses’ and Amalia’s love story like the Orpheus myth and how is it different?
12. The child Nicolai was destined for great fortune as a Riecher. So why does Moses kidnap his “son”? Should we blame him for this decision?
13. In his nocturnal wanderings in St. Gall, Moses understands that he has traded the ability to love, and to be loved, for the ability to sing like an angel. “All at once, the musico’s exchange made sense. We had given up this song of union for a song that we must sing alone” (page 163). How does singing replace love? And how does it not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Miracle at St. Anna
James McBride, 2002
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616802714
Summary
Inspired by a historical incident that took place in the village of St. Anna di Stazzema in Tuscany and by the experiences of the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division in Italy during World War 11, Miracle at St. Anna is a singular evocation of war, cruelty, passion, heroism, and love. It is the story of four American soldiers, the villagers among whom they take refuge, a band of partisans, and an Italian boy, all of whom encounter a miracle — though perhaps the true miracle lies in themselves.
Traversing class, race, and geography, Miracle at St. Anna is above, all a hymn to the brotherhood of man and the power to do good that lives in each of us. It reveals a little-known but fascinating moment in history through the eyes and imagination of a gifted writer. Like The Color of Water, James McBride's stunning' first novel will change the way we perceive ourselves and our world. (From the publisher.)
Spike Lee directed a 2008 film adaptation of the book, starring Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, and Laz Alonso.
Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Oberlin Conservatory of Music; M.A., Columbia
University
• Awards—American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award,
1996; ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award, 1996;
Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1997
• Currently—Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA
James McBride's bestselling memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, explores the author's struggle to understand his biracial identity and the experience of his white, Jewish mother, who moved to Harlem, married a black man, and raised 12 children. His first novel, Miracle at St. Anna (film version by Spike Lee), followed a black regiment through turbulent events in Italy late in World War II. It was a book of considerable breadth and character diversity.
Readers may not know that the multitalented McBride has another dual identity: He's trained as a musician and a writer and has been highly successful in both careers.
After getting his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University at the age of 22, he began a career in journalism that would include stints as staff writer at the Boston Globe, People magazine, and the Washington Post. But McBride also loved writing and performing music, and at age 30, he quit his job as a feature writer at the Washington Post to pursue a music career in New York. After Anita Baker recorded a song he'd written, "Good Enough," McBride had enough contacts in the industry to spend the next eight years as a professional musician, writing, recording, and performing (he plays the saxophone).
He was playing tenor sax for jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott while he wrote The Color of Water "on airplanes and in hotels." Like the jazz music McBride plays, the book alternates voices, trading off between McBride's perspective and that of his mother. The Color of Water was a worldwide success, selling millions of copies and drawing high praise from book critics. "This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths," wrote Publishers Weekly. It now appears on reading lists at high schools and colleges around the country.
After the enormous success of The Color of Water, McBride felt some pressure to continue writing memoirs, or at least to continue with the theme of race relations in America. Instead, he turned to fiction, and although his second book draws part of its inspiration from family history, it isn't autobiographical. "My initial aim was to write a novel about a group of black soldiers who liberate a concentration camp in Eastern Europe," McBride explains on his web site. "I read lots of books and spent a lot of time researching the subject but soon came to the realization that I'm not qualified to write about the holocaust. It's too much." Instead, he recalled the war stories of his uncle and cousin, who served in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, and began researching World War II in Italy—particularly the clashes between Italian Partisans and the German army.
The resulting novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is "an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war" (the New York Times Book Review) and has earned high marks from critics for its nuanced portrayal of four Buffalo Soldiers and the Italian villagers they encounter. McBride, perhaps not surprisingly, likens writing fiction to playing jazz: "You are the soloist and the characters are the bandleaders, the Duke Ellingtons and Count Basies. They present the song, and you must play it as they determine.
Extras
• McBride has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Gary Burton, and the PBS television character Barney. He has also written the score for several musicals and currently leads a 12-piece jazz/R&B band.
• One of his most taxing assignments as a journalist was to cover Michael Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour for six months. "I thought I was going to lose my mind," he told USA Today.
• For a book fair, he performed with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band made up of writers including Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Ridley Pearson. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Following the huge critical and commercial success of his nonfiction memoir, The Color of Water, McBride offers a powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy around the village of St. Anna of Stazzema in December 1944. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind; it is also a carefully crafted tale of a mute Italian orphan boy who teaches the American soldiers, Italian villagers and partisans that miracles are the result of faith and trust. Toward the end of 1944, four black U.S. Army soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in the village as winter and the German army close in. Pvt. Sam Train, a huge, dim-witted, gentle soldier, cares for the traumatized orphan boy and carries a prized statue's head in a sack on his belt. Train and his three comrades are scared and uncertain what to do next, but an Italian partisan named Peppi involves the Americans in a ruthless ploy to uncover a traitor among the villagers. Someone has betrayed the villagers and local partisans to the Germans, resulting in an unspeakable reprisal. Revenge drives Peppi, but survival drives the Americans. The boy, meanwhile, knows the truth of the atrocity and the identity of the traitor, but he clings to Train for comfort and protection. Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives.
Publishers Weekly
Having conquered nonfiction with The Color of Water, which dwelled on the New York Times best sellers list for two years, journalist McBride takes a chance at fiction. He roots his novel in actual events, relating an encounter between the 92nd Division's Buffalo Soldiers and a little boy from a Tuscan village where a terrible massacre has occurred.
Library Journal
Although McBride touches on issues of race, atrocity, and evil, these diverse characters are able to transcend such human failings through love and faith. —Margaret Flanaga.
Booklist
McBride's careful treatment of the differences among his black characters and his measured understanding of the unsuspected perils of cross-cultural contact make the end of the book especially surprising. Schooled in hard lessons by the novel, readers may find its last pages anomalous and disappointing.
Stephanie Foote - Book Magazine
Italy, 1944. Credulous giant Sam Train, a rural Southern negro in the embattled 92nd Division of the US Army - strung out along the Cinquale Canal and ranged against Kesselring's 148th Brigade Division - is persuaded by smooth faux-preacher Bishop to rescue a young Italian child caught in the middle of a firestorm. Miraculously unharmed and convinced that God has made him invisible, Train disappears with the boy into the slopes of the Apuane Alps, reluctantly pursued by three members of his unit, and into an actual occurrence in the war: the massacre by German SS of the inhabitants of Sant'Anna Di Stazzema. This novel vibrates with tenderness and sorrow. Its prose is simple and often beautiful, told in an American vernacular which at its height attains the feel and quality of Ralph Ellison, and at its lowest ebb - infrequently, and all the more startling for its exception - a contrived Hollywood ring. It is a book which defies pigeonholing, ranging from unnecessary sentimentality to the absolutely startling - '... the man who was chocolate, the chocolate giant who wept tears of soda pop and made it his birthday just by turning his head'. This is writing which falls in places, but which carries itself, heedless of its own imperfections, with the energy and beauty of a song. Love, faith, brotherhood and equality ripple in the words: McBride, with fervour reminiscent of James Baldwin, constructs a narrative of humanity, struggling to create meaning from the vast forces of history.
Kirkus Reviews (UK)
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think McBride chose to frame his WWII story with the post office episode that takes place in 1983? How does this narrative frame clarify or comment on the picture of the war it contains?
2. What knowledge of the African American experience in WWII did you bring to Miracle at St. Anna? How did reading the novel deepen your understanding of this aspect of the war?
3. In a fiery argument with Stamps, Bishop says, "So now the great white father sends you out here to shoot Germans so he can hang you back home for looking at his woman wrong.... The Negro don't have doodleysquat to do with this...this devilment, this war-to-free-the-world shit" [p. 147-9]. In what ways does the war reveal the racism and hypocrisy entrenched in American society? How are the black soldiers treated by their white commanders? How are they treated by the Italians? Is Bishop's cynicism justified?
4. Why does Train become so attached to the young Italian boy he rescues? What does the boy offer him that he's never had before? What does Train learn from him? Is the boy, as Train claims, "an angel"?
5. The novel is titled Miracle at St. Anna but several miracles occur in the book. Which of these is the miracle referred to in the title? What effects do these events have on those who experience them? Do you think McBride wants us to read them as divine manifestations of God's power or simply as remarkable occurrences?
6. Why does Rudolfo betray the Italian partisan hero Peppi, the "Black Butterfly"? What are the consequences of that betrayal? How is Rudolfo's treachery revealed?
7. Why does McBride tell the history of the statue's head that Train carries with him throughout the war? What does this history add to the story? Is it possible to read the entire novel as a complex elaboration of that statue's journey from a sixteenth-century marble mountain in Carrara, Italy, to late twentieth-century New York City?
8. In the Acknowledgments, McBride says that the book began when he was boy listening to his stepfather and step-uncles tell stories about the war. What struck him most forcefully was not the stories themselves but his Uncle Henry's pride in his service. In what ways does the novel—and its stories of the Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division—reflect that pride?
9. Train, Stamps, Bishop, and Hector are four distinctive and vividly drawn characters. How are they different from one another? What varying attitudes do they have about the war? What larger themes does McBride address through the conflict between Bishop and Stamps?
10. In a moment of mistrust of the Italians, Hector thinks: "He was glad he didn't love anybody. It was easier, safer, not to love somebody, not to have children and raise kids in this crummy world where a Puerto Rican wants to kill an innocent woman for doing nothing more than trying to help him" [p. 138]. Why would Hector feel this way? In what sense is the entire novel about love and the risk of loving?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Seventh Heaven
Alice Hoffman, 1990
Penguin Group USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425188484
Summary
Nora Silk doesn’t really fit in on Hemlock Street, where every house looks the same.
She's divorced.
She wears a charm bracelet and high heels and red toreador pants.
And the way she raises her kids is a scandal.
But as time passes, the neighbors start having second thoughts about Nora. The women’s apprehension evolves into admiration. The men’s lust evolves into awe. The children are drawn to her in ways they can't explain. And everyone on this little street in 1959 Long Island seems to sense the possibilities and perils of a different kind of future when they look at Nora Silk . . .
This extraordinary novel by the author of The River King and Local Girls takes us back to a time when the exotic both terrified and intrigued us, and despite our most desperate attempts, our passions and secrets remained as stubbornly alive as the weeds in our well-trimmed lawns.. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 16, 1952
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Adelphi Univ.; M.A., Stanford Univ.
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
Born in the 1950s to college-educated parents who divorced when she was young, Alice Hoffman was raised by her single, working mother in a blue-collar Long Island neighborhood. Although she felt like an outsider growing up, she discovered that these feelings of not quite belonging positioned her uniquely to observe people from a distance. Later, she would hone this viewpoint in stories that captured the full intensity of the human experience.
After high school, Hoffman went to work for the Doubleday factory in Garden City. But the eight-hour, supervised workday was not for her, and she quit before lunch on her first day! She enrolled in night school at Adelphi University, graduating in 1971 with a degree in English. She went on to attend Stanford University's Creative Writing Center on a Mirrellees Fellowship. Her mentor at Stanford, the great teacher and novelist Albert Guerard, helped to get her first story published in the literary magazine Fiction. The story attracted the attention of legendary editor Ted Solotaroff, who asked if she had written any longer fiction. She hadn't — but immediately set to work. In 1977, when Hoffman was 25, her first novel, Property Of, was published to great fanfare.
Since that remarkable debut, Hoffman has carved herself a unique niche in American fiction. A favorite with teens as well as adults, she renders life's deepest mysteries immediately understandable in stories suffused with magic realism and a dreamy, fairy-tale sensibility. (In a 1994 article for the New York Times, interviewer Ruth Reichl described the magic in Hoffman's books as a casual, regular occurrence — "...so offhand that even the most skeptical reader can accept it.") Her characters' lives are transformed by uncontrollable forces — love and loss, sorrow and bliss, danger and death.
Hoffman's 1997 novel Here on Earth was selected as an Oprah Book Club pick, but even without Winfrey's powerful endorsement, her books have become huge bestsellers — including three that have been adapted for the movies: Practical Magic (1995), The River King (2000), and her YA fable Aquamarine (2001).
Hoffman is a breast cancer survivor; and like many people who consider themselves blessed with luck, she believes strongly in giving back. For this reason, she donated her advance from her 1999 short story collection Local Girls to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Hoffman has written a number of children's books, including Fireflies: A Winter's Tale (1999), Horsefly (2000), and Moondog (2004).
• Aquamarine was written for Hoffman's best friend, Jo Ann, who dreamed of the freedom of mermaids as she battled brain cancer.
• Here on Earth is a modern version of Hoffman's favorite novel, Wuthering Heights.
• Hoffman has been honored with the Massachusetts Book Award for her teen novel Incantation.
• When asked what books most influenced her life or career, here's what she said:
Edward Eager's brilliant series of suburban magic: Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Magic or Not, Knight's Castle, The Time Garden, Seven-Day Magic, The Well Wishers. Anything by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, J. D. Salinger, Grace Paley. My favorite book: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews;
Part American Graffiti, part early Updike, Seventh Heaven simultaneously chronicles the coming of age of a group of teenagers in a Long Island town, and the gradual dissolution of their parents’ repressed, middle-class world...A parable about changing times and changing values.
New York Times
Before you know it, you're half in love with the ordinary people who inhabit this book; you're seduced by their susceptibility to the remarkable.
The New Yorker
Literary magic... A beautiful, deceptively simple story about ordinary life in an ordinary housing development nestled beside the Southern State Parkway...Hoffman breaks down the barriers of time, distance, and reticence. She takes us inside the houses of Hemlock Street and shows us how our ordinary neighbors—like ouselves—are both unique and universal, and worthy of love.
Newsday
Brilliant and astonishing...Suffused with magic. If ever a book deserved to be called "haunting," this is it. In every sense of the word.
Newsweek
Nora is ahead of her time. A single mother in 1950s suburbia, she's strong, sexy, passionate, and mysterious. Everyone in town is touched by her, and in the mirror of her magnetism, people see themselves as never before. With Nora's courageous image before them, they begin to ask themselves questions they had never asked—finding answers they had never dared to imagine
Cosmopolitan
In the full flowering of her extraordinary talent, Hoffman has produced a wise, poignant and uplifting novel luminous with the sensitive evocation of ordinary lives. The setting is a Long Island, N.Y., housing development from 1959 to 1960, a place of conforming, happy families where husbands mow the lawns of the tract houses and wives meet for coffee, where "safety hung over the neighborhood like a net." The arrival of Nora Silk, a brassy divorcee with two young children, is the catalyst for disturbing changes and events, some of them violent. Plucky, impetuous, innocently seductive and a messy housekeeper, Nora is anathema to the subdivision wives, who ostracize her and whose children torment her eight-year-old clairvoyant son, Billy. But as Nora's presence disturbs the community, it is slowly revealed that behind the identical facades of the houses are secret lives of turmoil, restlessness and longing. As in all Hoffman novels, mundane existence is disrupted in surprising ways: families disintegrate, a teenager dies, a placid housewife disappears. And ultimately Nora, whose optimism about her dead-end life is unquenchable, becomes an instrument of healing. Hoffman has intuitive grasp of the thoughts and feelings that are masked by conventional behavior. Like some of her characters, she seems to have a spooky ability to read thoughts; how else to account for her unerring understanding of people of nearly every age and across a broad social spectrum? She has a gift for perceiving the cruelty of children and the wide gulf that yawns between the most loving, attentive parents and their offspring's unknown wishes and deeds. As usual, she tells more than a compulsively readable story. She does magic, she unsettles you and she leaves you feeling emotionally purged and satisfied.
Publishers Weekly
In felicitously recording the lives of newcomers-on-the-block Nora Silk and her sons, baby James and young Billy, Hoffman proves once again that she can tell a charming story about suburbia that is, at once, mundane and oddly transcendent. Nora, a young, sexy divorcee, moves to the suburbs of New York City following her divorce (in 1959 a scandalous event). All alone, she manages work, her sons, and assorted domestic responsibilities with quirky flair, if not thoroughness (and occasional help from assorted magic spells inherited from her grandfather). Hoffman takes the reader back to that apparently innocent time and into a "nice" neighborhood, where the sunny replicated exteriors of the houses hide sometimes desperate lives within. Nora and her neighbors signal lifestyles of the future: a woman walks out on her family, another goes back to work; a boy is abused and strikes back; a father leaves home. Combining reality with magic, this novel surpasses At Risk. —Lauren Bielski, New York
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 Seventh Heaven:
1. Start with Noral Silk. What is it about her that, at first, the neighbors on Hemlock Street find so disturbing? Should Nora have tried a little harder to blend in with the residents, if only for Billy's sake? What, eventually, draws residents to Nora? What does she offer them?
2. What is Nora hoping to find or experience in her new life in the Long Island subdivision? What kind of lives are all the residents of this suburban world hoping to live? Are suburbs really the safe, insulated world their residents hope it will be?
3. What about Nora and 17-year-old Ace McCarthy? How do you feel about their relationship?
4. When Billy begins to practice his father's magic trick, is he really starting to look fainter or is that that others are simply ignoring him?
5. Hoffman shows us Hemlock Street, not just through Nora, but through the eyes of a number of residents. Talk about some of the other characters in the subdivision: Joe Hennessy (why does he find his role as detective troubling?); Donna Durgin (what prompts her diet and her abandonment of her family?); Danny and Rickie (what adolescent struggles are they going through?) What do these characters' stories reveal about life in a 1950's era subdivision?
6. The novel is set in the late 1950s, on the cusp of the '60s. Why might Hoffman have chosen that particular time for her story? What larger issue is she exploring? In what way were the '50s and '60s different from one another? (Think about Nora, for instance, and how she represents, thematically, a disruptive influence on a seemingly placid community.)
7. Hoffman makes use of magical realism, the incorporation of supernatural elements into otherwise realistic stories. She believes that we live in a magical world. How does she inject fantastic events and objects into this novel? Do you appreciate her fantasy or find it contrived?
8. By the end of the novel, how have characters changed? What, if anything, have they learned...or gained? Do you find the ending satisfying? Do you feel as if all the strings are tied neatly together...or are some things left open and unresolved?
8. Have you read other Alice Hoffman novels? How does this one compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Wounded
Claudia Mair Burney, 2008
David C. Cook Publisher
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781434799388
Summary
Poor in health but rich in faith, Gina Merritt—a young, broke, African-American single mother—sits in a pew on Ash Wednesday and has a holy vision. When it fades, her palms are bleeding. Anthony Priest, the junkie sitting beside her, instinctively touches her when she cries out, but Gina flees in shock and pain. A prize-winning journalist before drugs destroyed his career, Anthony is flooded with a sense of well-being and knows he is cured of his addiction.
Without understanding why, Anthony follows Gina home to find some answers. Together they search for an answer to this miraculous event and along the way they cross paths with a skeptical evangelical pastor, a gentle Catholic priest, a certifiable religious zealot, and an oversized transvestite drug dealer, all of whom lend their opinion. It's a quest for truth, sanity, and grace and an unexpected love story. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
Claudia Mair Burney is the author of the novel Zora and Nicky: A Novel in Black and White, as well as the Amanda Bell Brown Mysteries and the "Exorsista" series for teens. Her work has appeared in Discipbleship Journal, The One Year Life Verse Devotional Bible, and Justice in the Burbs. She lives in Michigan with her husband, five of their seven children, and a quirky dwarf rabbit. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Burney's offbeat story, which explores what it might mean to literally share in Christ's suffering, demonstrates an edginess that both attracts and repels. Burney's protagonist, Regina "Gina" Dolores Merritt, is a 24-year-old black, health-conscious, bipolar, once suicidal single mom with fibromyalgia and migraines and a history of mental illness. It's a lot to put on one character. When she appears to receive the stigmata on Ash Wednesday at her Vineyard Church in Ann Arbor, Mich. (perhaps based on real-life pastor Ken Wilson and his church), a circus of sorts ensues. Druggie Anthony Priest shows up to help, as does Priest's alienated mother, Veronica Morelli. Events catapult toward an unexpected conclusion. Burney pushes the boundaries for her faith fiction audience sexually, especially in references to Christ as lover. The multiple first-person perspectives work well, but stories about saints seem inserted rather than integral, and a few characters feel overdrawn. However, Burney's unusual voice, gritty themes, and ecumenical blending should help this uninhibited novel find a home, especially with emergent church readers.
Publishers Weekly
Sitting in a church pew on Ash Wednesday in great physical pain, African American mother Gina Merritt prays for relief, instantly having a vision of Jesus, who kisses her hands and leaves the stigmata of two red roses. The junkie sitting next to her touches Gina, and believing he is cured of his addiction, follows her home. This original tale about the nature of miracles in modern times from the author of Zora and Nicky: A Novel in Black and White and the "Amanda Bell Brown" mystery series includes the viewpoints of a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a cast of colorful characters, including a transvestite drug dealer. The subject matter may be controversial for some readers, but this thought-provoking novel deserves a place in fiction collections, especially where there is a demand for books that feature African American protagonists. Highly recommended.
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 Wounded:
1. The book's title, "wounded," has numerous meanings. What is its significance? Who all in this novel is wounded—and in what ways?
2. When Gina tells Mike that "Jesus kissed [her] hand and pierced it," why does Mike think, "not this"?
3. According to Mike, "People of God go through life believing without seeing; that's the nature of faith." Then he refers to the famous quotation from Hebrews (I:1): "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." How does that understanding of faith affect those surrounding Gina? How easy is it for doubt to enter into our own lives—all of us? What would your reaction have been to Gina had you met her in real life?
4. Why is Gina chosen? And why is she a surprising, even unbelievable, recipient of the stigmata?
5. Gina is visited by two different men of the cloth: a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister. What are their reactions to Gina? What do they reveal about themselves...and what do you think of them?
6. Were you disturbed—or intrigued—by Burney's treatment of Jesus as both a human with human lovers and the Son of God?
7. What about the novel's structure—told in rotating voices of the main characters? Why might Burney have chosen that format—and does it work for you? Talk about how the characters (and their voices) differ from one another. Is there one in particular whom you favor?
8. Do you find the stories of the saints engaging...or do you feel they're intrusive, disrupting the plot's momentum?
9. What does Wounded suggest about human struggle and God's beneficence—and about the "types" of people who are elegible to receive grace?
10. Does this story alter, reinforce, or challenge your view of Christianity and what it means to be a person of faith?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)
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