The Million Dollar Demise
R.M. Johnson, 2009
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416596271
Summary
Picking up where The Million Dollar Deception left off, Freddy Ford knocks on Nate Kenny's door, storms into the house, and shoots both Nate and Nate's ex-wife Monica. But he doesn't stop there — before driving off, Freddy manages to escape with little Nathaniel, Nate and Monica's beloved adopted son, while little Layla sleeps upstairs.
Nate is expected to survive the brutal attack, but Monica is left in a coma, and doctors are not certain that she will ever recover. When Lewis Waters — Freddy's best friend and Layla's actual father — visits the hospital to see Monica, Nate bargains with him: if Lewis can get Freddy arrested, Nate will give him back his little girl.
Meanwhile, Daphanie Coleman, the woman Nate had planned to marry before he sought revenge on Monica, rushes to Nate's side with plans to get him back by making herself available to him in his time of crisis. By chance, she meets Lewis while visiting Monica's bedside, and the two devise a plan so both get what they want.
When Monica finally awakens, she opens her eyes to a world in which Daphanie and Nate are hiding an affair, Lewis and Daphanie are harboring nasty secrets, and Nate has plotted to steal another man's child in the name of revenge. Will Monica forgive Nate, whom she was about to remarry? Will she uncover the truth behind the love triangle of Daphanie, Lewis, and Nate? And, more important, can the tragic lovers escape a second attempt on their lives? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—R. Marcus Johnson
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.S., University of Louisian; M.F.A, Chicago State
University
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
RM Johnson was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. After high school, he served five years in the United States Army. After which he received his Bachelors degree in science, from the University of Louisiana. He worked as an x-ray technologist, and radiation therapist for a number of years while continuously working on his writing, and earned a Masters degree in creative writing from Chicago State University
In 1996, RM wrote The Harris Men, published in 1999. Since then, RM Johnson has written nine novels, including the best-sellers, The Harris Family, Dating Games, and his "Million Dollar" trilogy. Stacie and Cole was his first young adult novel, published in December 2007 by Hyperion Books.
Johnson's "Million Dollar" trilogy includess The Million Dollar Divorce (2004), followed by The Million Dollar Deception (2008) and The Million Dollar Demise (2009).
In June of 2009, RM threw his ring into the non-fiction ring with Why Men Fear Marriage. (Adapted fom the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The crazed conclusion of Johnson's "Million Dollar" trilogy opens with a literal bang. Freddy Ford shoots millionaire Nate Kenny and Nate's ex-wife, Monica, at the couple's Chicago mansion and kidnaps their three-year-old adopted son, Nathaniel. The reason? Nate reneged on rewarding Freddy for his part in a blackmail scheme that led to the arrest of Freddy's best friend, Lewis Waters, in the previous book, The Million Dollar Deception (2008). Lewis was getting too cozy with Monica, whom Nate is eager to remarry. As a result of their serious gunshot wounds, Nate and Monica (who's in a coma) miss Lewis's hearing, at which he's set free. In a weird twist of fate, Lewis agrees to help Nate find Freddy, who's holding Nathaniel for $5 million ransom—but only if Nate will do Lewis a favor. Meanwhile, Nate's spurned lover, Daphanie Coleman, pregnant with another man's child, plots her revenge. The rushed ending suggests the duplicitous Nate could return to commit further mischief in a sequel.
Publishers Weekly
Johnson ties up the loose threads of his fast-paced, thuggish trilogy. In The Million Dollar Divorce (2004) and The Million Dollar Deception (2008), Nate Kenny manipulated, interfered, bought off and blackmailed his way into the life he wanted; when wife Monica couldn't bear him a child, he hired Lewis Waters to seduce her so he could save his fortune in a no-contest divorce. But everything has repercussions, and this final installment opens with the appearance of Freddy Ford, Lewis' best friend, who has lost everything he loves thanks to Nate. Freddy shows up at Nate's house, shoots him four times, shoots Monica in the head (the two were reconciling) and kidnaps their adopted son Nathaniel. He leaves Chicago for Atlanta, killing a cop on the way, to hide out with old girlfriend Joni while he figures out what to do with the toddler in the back seat and the law on his trail. Against all odds Nate survives, and Monica lies in a coma with good chances for a full recovery. The story is complicated by Daphanie, Nate's girlfriend before he reconciled with Monica. Daphanie, pregnant by Trevor, tells Nate that the baby is really his in an attempt to woo him back while Monica is still out of commission. Lewis is trying to regain custody of his daughter Layla, who lives at Monica and Nate's house, though he is not sure he is her biological father. Deceptions, more killing, a budding romance between Lewis and a social worker—it's a lot of plot in one book. There are some strange, sad moments, as when Freddy and Joni reassure themselves they'd make great parents, and no one survives intact in this kind of modern pulp noir, driven by a nihilism that sees deception as the world's lingua franca. The over-fed conclusion to an African-American soap opera.
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 The Million Dollar Demise:
1. If you have read the previous two installments in Johnson's Million Dollar series, how does this one stack up? Is it as suspenseful or compelling? Are the characters consistent with their roles in the previous novel(s)?
2. What is Freddy's motive for shooting Nate at the opening of the book? Can Freddy be held blameless for his anger toward Nate?
3. What kind of character is Nate? What drives him? Does this man have any redeeming qualities? What is it that makes scoundrels appealing—either as real life individuals or as fictional characters?
4. What about Monica? How do you feel about her reconciliation with Nate?
5. How does it happen that Lewis agrees to help Nate find Freddy and Nate's son Nathaniel? Is Lewis nuts?!
6. What about Daphne Coleman? What is her stake in all of this?
7. Is there any kind of future for Freddy and Joni? What kind of parents would they make?
8. Were you surprised by the ending? Are you satisfied with how the book ends—does The Million Dollar Demise deliver for you—in terms of page-turning suspense and narrative power?
9. It looks as if Johnson is setting readers up for another installment in his series. Want to try to guess what shape it might take?
10. Deception and betrayal are at the heart of this book. Is this the way the real world works? In other words, is this book a depiction of life?
11. Finally, does anyone in this book/series have a redeeming quality? Which characters, if any, do you find sympathetic? Anyone you find yourself rooting for? If you had to choose one character, who you would want to find in your own life?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Shell Seekers
Rosamunde Pilcher, 1987
Random House
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312961329
Summary
Set in London and Cornwall from World War II to present, The Shell Seekers tells the story of the Keeling family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The family centers around Penelope, and it is her love, courage, and sense of values that determine the course of all their lives, Deftly shifting back and forth in time, each chapter centers on one of the principal players in the family's history.
The unifying thread is an oil painting entitled "The Shell Seekers," done by Penelope's father. It is this painting that symbolizes to Penelope the ties between the generations. But it is the fate of this painting that just may tear the family apart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Jane Fraser
• Birth—September 22, 1924
• Where—Lelant, Cornwall, England, UK
• Education—Miss Kerr-Sanders Secretarial College
• Currently—Invergowrie by Dundee, Scotland, UK
Prior to the phenomenal success of The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a novelist and short-story writer, but it was with this novel that she found herself embraced by readers around the globe. She is now internationally recognized as one of the most-loved storytellers of our time and has gone on to write the celebrated bestselling novels Coming Home and September. She lives with her husband Graham and their dog Daisy in Perthshire, Scotland. (From the publisher.)
More
Rosamunde Pilcher was born in Lelant, Cornwall on September 22, 1924. She attended St. Clare's Polwithen and Howell's School Llandaff before going on to Miss Kerr-Sanders' Secretarial College. She began writing for herself when she was seven, and published her first short story when she was only 18.
From 1943 through 1946, Pilcher served with the Women's Naval Service. On December 7, 1946 she married Graham Hope Pilcher. They moved to Dundee, Scotland, where she still lives today. Besides being a housewife and mother of four children, she wrote short stories and love stories for women's magazines at her kitchen table using the pen name Jane Fraser.
In 1949, Pilcher's first book, a romance novel, was published by Mills and Boon, under the pseudonym Jane Fraser. She published an additional ten novels under that name. In 1955 she also began writing under her real name with Secret to Tell. By 1965 she had dropped the pseudonym and was signing her own name to all of her novels.
At the beginning writing was a refuge from her daily life. She claims that writing saved her marriage. The real breakthrough in Pilcher's career came in 1987, when she wrote the family saga, The Shell Seekers. Since then her books have made her one of the more successful contemporary female authors.
One of her most famous works, The Shell Seekers, focusses on Penelope Stern Keeling, an elderly British woman who relives her life in flashbacks, and on her relationship with her adult children. Keeling's life was not extraordinary, but it spans "a time of huge importance and change in the world." The novel describes the everyday details of what life during World War II was like for some of those who lived in Britain. The Shell Seekers sold more than five million copies worldwide and was adapted for the stage by Terence Brady and Charlotte Bingham.
Extras
• Her books are especially popular in Germany due to the fact that the national TV station ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) has produced more than 70 of her stories for TV. These TV films are some of the most popular programmes on ZDF. Both Pilcher and ZDF programme director Dr. Claus Beling were awarded the British Tourism Award in 2002 for the positive effect the books and the TV versions had on tourism.
• Pilcher retired from writing in 2000. Two years later she was created an Officer of the British Empire (OBE)
• She has four children and fourteen grandchildren. Her son, Robin Pilcher, is also a novelist. (Bio from Wikipedia.)
For more information visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
[Flashbacks] are done with the ease and charm of a kindly friend showing you a photograph album: not a mammoth session to glaze the eyes, but a gentle journey telling you these longed-for facts about people you already know.... It is a measure of this story's strength and success that a reader can be carried for more than 500 pages in total involvement with Penelope, her children, her past and the painting that hangs in her country cottage. The Shell Seekers is a deeply satisfying story, written with love and confidence.
Maeve Binchy - New York Times
Beautifully done.... A book about families.... When the reader closes the book, it is with a sense of regret—regret that there is no more.
Boston Herald
A lovely story, the best, really absorbing book I've read in a long time, the kind you hate to put down and especially hate to finish.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
On the heels of a hasty wartime marriage, Penelope Keeling is left to repent at leisure in the English seaside town of Porthkerris, where her artist father and her French mother are spending the duration of World War II. Safe in the embracing arms of that warm household, Penelope forgets her sour husband and takes a lover, and in that relationship, too, she weathers the war's privations and its hardest blows. In a beautifully detailed family saga that shifts effortlessly back and forth in time, Pilcher (Under Gemini) recounts Penelope's story and that of her three children. When their grandfather's work suddenly comes into vogue, Nancy, obsessed over status, and sleek Noel, adept at getting the most and giving the least, join in urging their mother to sell The Shell Seekers, a painting that gives her great joy. Only Olivia, a cool and collected magazine editor, refuses to be party to their barely concealed avarice. Pilcher's 13th book is a satisfying and savory family novel, in which rich layers of description and engagingly flawed characters more than make up for the occasional cliche.
Publishers Weekly
As this absorbing saga of a modern English family opens, 64-year-old Penelope Keeling is returning to her country house following a heart attack, and her three adult children have varying reactions to the news. The narrative is actually a series of deftly interwoven vignettes that shift back and forth in time; each chapter centers on one of the principal players in the family's history. The unifying thread is an oil painting entitled "The Shell Seekers," done by Penelope's father. Pilcher's characters are well-drawn, real, and engrossing people. A thoroughly charming book for most fiction collections. Troll Book Club main selection. —Maria A. Perez-Stable, Western Michigan Univ. Libs., Kalamazoo
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 The Shell Seekers:
1. How would you describe Penelope Keeling as a character? What traits you would you ascribe to her? Maeve Binchy has said that Penelope's ordinariness is what makes her character so likable...and also what gives her strength. Is she ordinary, and if so, is Binchy correct?
2. What makes Noel and Nancy so unlikable? (Honestly, does Nancy have to be overweight?) Does Pilcher develop them fully as emotionally complex characters ... or as shallow, one-dimensional characters?
3. What about Olivia? Is she too good to be true? She clearly has her mother's favor: how might this affect the behavior of Noel and Nancy? Why doesn't Penelope tell Olivia about Richard? Do you wish she had?
4. Talk about the incident of the red dress. What was your reaction when it was found in the closet?
5. How did Penelope's own upbringing, by her Bohemian artist parents, prepare her—or not—for her later life? What values and ideals did she take away from her growing-up years?
6. How does the prospect of an inheritance affect family dynamics, both in this story and in life? Is Pilcher's account of Penelope's family realistic?
7. What does Penelope learn as she journeys, literally and figurativelly, back into her past? How does it change her?
8. Talk about the book's World War II years. In what way does Pilcher bring that era alive?
9. What is the symbolic significance of the novel's title and its reference to the Shell Seekers painting?
10. Why does Penelope want to keep The Shell Seekers? What does it mean to her? Were you held in suspense wondering how Penelope would eventually dispense with the painting? Where you satisfied with the outcome?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
227 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400078431
Summary
Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack.
This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness...about marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself." With vulnerability and passion, Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience of love and loss.
The Year of Magical Thinking will speak directly to anyone who has ever loved a husband, wife, or child. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 5, 1934
• Where—Sacramento, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California at Berkeley
• Awards—National Book Award, 2005
• Currently—New York, New York
For over forty years, Joan Didion has been widely renowned as one of the strongest, wittiest, and most-acerbic voices in journalism, literature, and film. With such fierce works as Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Salvador, and The White Album, she exposed shifting cultural and political climates with humor and unflinching clarity. In classic novels such as A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, and The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion further explored American culture and politics through the veil of fiction.
Together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, she co-wrote films like The Panic in Needle Park and Play It As It Lays. Firmly established as a heavy hitter in the field of sober political criticism, contemporary literature, and cutting humor, no one could have been more unnerved by Didion's psychological unraveling in the wake of a pair of tragedies than Didion herself — a fact she conveys in her brilliant, shattering latest work.
The Year of Magical Thinking chronicles an exceptionally unforgiving period in Didion's life. Her recently married daughter Quintana had been stricken with pneumonia and fell into a coma. Only a week later, her husband and partner of 40-years died of a heart attack. Battered by these events, Didion felt her grip on reality suddenly slipping, expecting her husband to return home at any moment. "Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it," Didion later told New York magazine, "which was the interesting aspect of it to me — how really tenuous our sanity is."
As a means of dealing with her intense grief, Didion found herself unconsciously composing the book that would help her work through the pain of losing a husband while watching a daughter slowly fade away. As she told Barnes & Noble.com...
When I began doing it, I was just writing down notes on what the doctors had said, and their telephone numbers, and their recommendations for other specialists, and then I realized that I was writing other stuff down too — and then I thought, well, I'll just write it all down, and then I realized I was thinking about how to structure it, which was kind of a clue that I was writing something.
What she was writing was The Year of Magical Thinking. She explained to New York magazine that she structured her book so that it served as a parallel to the grieving process, "the way in which you obsessively go over the same scenes again and again and again trying to make them end differently." The book ultimately fuses her finely crafted, sardonic prose with a story more personal than any she had ever told before. As Robert Pinsky of the New York Times Book Review wrote, "As in Didion's previous writing, her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous." Pinsky is not alone in his praise of Didion's latest; The Year of Magical Thinking has also received well-deserved raves from publications such as the Washington Post and Library Journal.
Most important of all is the role the book has played in Didion's own recovery from her disastrous year. "It became very useful to me," she says, "useful in terms of processing and trying to figure out what had happened."
Blue Nights about the death of her daughter...and her own impending demise was published in 2012. Kirkus Reviews called it "a slim, somber classic."
Extras
From a 2006 Barnes & Noble interview:
• "My first (and only, ever) job was at Vogue. I learned a great deal there—I learned how to use words economically (because I was writing to space), I learned how to very quickly take in enough information about an entirely foreign subject to produce a few paragraphs that at least sounded authoritative.
• "I would like my readers to know that writing never gets any easier. You don't gain confidence. You are always flying blind."
• Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, co-wrote seven screenplays, including: The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Play It As It Lays (1973), A Star Is Born (1977), True Confessions (1982), Hills Like White Elephants (1990), Broken Trust (1995) and Up Close and Personal (1995).
• She is the sister-in-law of author Dominick Dunne and the aunt of actor/director Griffin Dunne.
• When asked about which book influenced her most as a writer, here is her response:
It's hard to limit this to one book, but the book from which I learned the most as a writer was Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. I taught myself to type by tying out passages from a lot of Hemingway, but that book especially—it taught me the importance of absolute precision, of how every word and every comma and every absence of a word or comma can change the meaning, make the rhythm, make the difference.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
In her devastating new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, Ms. Didion writes about the year she spent trying to come to terms with what happened that terrible December.... It is an utterly shattering book that gives the reader an indelible portrait of loss and grief and sorrow, all chronicled in minute detail with the author's unwavering, reportorial eye.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative…As in Didion's previous writing, her sense of timing, sentence by sentence and in the arrangement of scenes, draws the reader forward. Her manner is deadpan funny, slicing away banality with an air that is ruthless yet meticulous.
Robert Pinsky - New York Times Book Review
The Year of Magical Thinking, though it spares nothing in describing Didion's confusion, grief and derangement, is a work of surpassing clarity and honesty. It may not provide "meaning" to her husband's death or her daughter's illness, but it describes their effects on her with unsparing candor. It was not written as a self-help handbook for the bereaved but as a journey into a place that none of us can fully imagine until we have been there.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far. A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of the intricacies of marital and parental relationships
Publishers Weekly
On December 30, 2003, Didion witnessed the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, from a massive coronary in their living room. The couple had just returned home after visiting their daughter, Quintana, who had been hospitalized and placed on life support several days earlier, diagnosed with a severe case of septic shock. Several weeks later, their daughter recovered, only to collapse two months later from a massive hematoma that required emergency brain surgery and an arduous recovery. (Quintana Roo Dunne Michael died on August 26, 2005.) This work is both a memoir of Didion's family life and a meditation chronicling the course of her grief. Throughout this account she describes her attempts to study grief, reading extensively on the topic because "information was control." While the events and emotions disclosed are tragic and uncomfortable, the author's description of her relationship with her husband and daughter lend beauty to the tragedy. —Dawn Eckenrode, Daniel A. Reed Lib., SUNY-Fredonia
Library Journal
A moving record of Didion's effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter. In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman's life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne's death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By "magical thinking," Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief-being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband's clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author's personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain. A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion's earlier writing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Consider the four sentences in italics that begin chapter one. What did you think when you read them for the first time? What do you think now?
2. In particular, address "The question of self-pity." Does Didion pity herself? In what ways does she indulge that impulse, and in what ways does she deny it?
3. Read the Judges' Citation for the National Book Award, above. Why do you suppose they deemed the book a masterpiece of investigative journalism?
4. Discuss the notion of "magical thinking." Have you ever experienced anything like this, after a loss or some other life-changing occurrence? How did it help, or hinder, your healing?
5. Do you think Didion's "year of magical thinking" ended after one year, or did it likely continue?
6. Consider the tone Didion uses throughout the book, one of relatively cool detachment. Clearly she is in mourning, and yet her anguish is quite muted. How did this detached tone affect your reading experience?
7. How does Didion use humor? To express her grief, to deflect it, or for another purpose entirely?
8. Over the course of the book, Didion excerpts avariety of poems. Which resonated for you most deeply, and why?
9. To Didion, there is a clear distinction between grief and mourning. What differences do you see between the two?
10. One word critics have used again and again in describing this book is "exhilarating." Did you find it to be so? Why, or why not?
11. Discuss Didion's repetition of sentences like "For once in your life just let it go"; "We call it the widowmaker"; "I tell you that I shall not live two days"; and "Life changes in the instant." What purpose does the repetition serve? How did your understanding of her grief change each time you reread one of these sentences?
12. The lifestyle described in this book is quite different from the way most people live, with glamorous friends, expensive homes, and trips to Hawaii, Paris, South America, etc., and yet none of that spared Didion from experiencing profound grief. Did her seemingly privileged life color your feelings about the book at all? Did that change after reading it?
13. At several points in the book Didion describes her need for knowledge, whether it's from reading medical journals or grilling the doctors at her daughter's bedside. How do you think this helped her to cope?
14. Reread the "gilded-boy story" on pages 105-6. How would you answer the questions it raised for Didion?
15. Is there a turning point in this book? If so, where would you place it and why?
16. The last sentence of the book is "No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that." What does this mean?
17. Didion is adapting The Year of Magical Thinking into a play bound for Broadway. How do you imagine its transition from page to stage? Would you want to see the play?
18. Before The Year of Magical Thinking, had you ever read any of Joan Didion's work? Do you see any similar themes or motifs?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Rescue
Anita Shreve, 2010
Little, Brown & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316020725
Summary
A rookie paramedic pulls a young woman alive from her totaled car, a first rescue that begins a lifelong tangle of love and wreckage. Sheila Arsenault is a gorgeous enigma—streetwise and tough-talking, with haunted eyes, fierce desires, and a never-look-back determination. Peter Webster, as straight an arrow as they come, falls for her instantly and entirely. Soon Sheila and Peter are embroiled in an intense love affair, married, and parents to a baby daughter. Like the crash that brought them together, it all happened so fast.
Can you ever really save another person? Eighteen years later, Sheila is long gone and Peter is raising their daughter, Rowan, alone. But Rowan is veering dangerously off track, and for the first time in their ordered existence together, Webster fears for her future. His work shows him daily every danger the world contains, how wrong everything can go in a second. All the love a father can give a daughter is suddenly not enough.
Sheila's sudden return may be a godsend—or it may be exactly the wrong moment for a lifetime of questions and anger and longing to surface anew. What tore a young family apart? Is there even worse damage ahead? The questions lifted up in Anita Shreve's utterly enthralling new novel are deep and lasting, and this is a novel that could only have been written by a master of the human heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1946
• Raised—Dedham, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A. Tufts University
• Awards—PEN/L.L. Winship Award; O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts
Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of nearly 20 books—including two works of nonfiction and 17 of fiction. Her novels include, most recently, Stella Bain (2013), as well as The Weight of Water (1997), a finalist for England's Orange prize; The Pilot's Wife (1998), a selection of Oprah's Book Club; All He Even Wanted (2003), Body Surfing (2007); Testimony (2008); A Change in Altitude (2010). She lives in Massachusetts. (From the publisher.)
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For many readers, the appeal of Anita Shreve’s novels is their ability to combine all of the escapist elements of a good beach read with the kind of thoughtful complexity not generally associated with romantic fiction. Shreve’s books are loaded with enough adultery, eroticism, and passion to make anyone keep flipping the pages, but the writer whom People magazine once dubbed a “master storyteller” is also concerned with the complexities of her characters’ motivations, relationships, and lives.
Shreve’s novels draw on her diverse experiences as a teacher and journalist: she began writing fiction while teaching high school, and was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her story, "Past the Island, Drifting." She then spent several years working as a journalist in Africa, and later returned to the States to raise her children. In the 1980s, she wrote about women’s issues, which resulted in two nonfiction books—Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone—before breaking into mainstream fiction with Eden Close in 1989.
This interest in women’s lives—their struggles and success, families and friendships—informs all of Shreve’s fiction. The combination of her journalist’s eye for detail and her literary ear for the telling turn of phrase mean that Shreve can spin a story that is dense, atmospheric, and believable. Shreve incorporates the pull of the sea—the inexorable tides, the unpredictable surf—into her characters’ lives the way Willa Cather worked the beauty and wildness of the Midwestern plains into her fiction. In Fortune’s Rocks and The Weight of Water, the sea becomes a character itself, evocative and ultimately consuming. In Sea Glass, Shreve takes the metaphor as far as she can, where characters are tested again and again, only to emerge stronger by surviving the ravages of life.
A domestic sensualist, Shreve makes use of the emblems of household life to a high degree, letting a home tell its stories just as much as its inhabitants do, and even recycling the same house through different books and periods of time, giving it a sort of palimpsest effect, in which old stories burn through the newer ones, creating a historical montage. "A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell," she says. "I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house."
Shreve’s work is sometimes categorized as "women’s fiction," because of her focus on women’s sensibilties and plights. But her evocative and precise language and imagery take her beyond category fiction, and moderate the vein of sentimen-tality which threads through her books. Moreover, her kaleidoscopic view of history, her iron grip on the details and detritus of 19th-century life (which she sometimes inter-sperses with a 20th-century story), and her uncanny ability to replicate 19th-century dialogue without sounding fusty or fussy, make for novels that that are always absorbing and often riveting. If she has a flaw, it is that her imagery is sometimes too cinematic, but one can hardly fault her for that: after all, the call of Hollywood is surely as strong as the call of the sea for a writer as talented as Shreve. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Shreve gets deep inside these characters, and her insights draw us into their lives…The relationship between the secretive, hard-drinking, oddly vulnerable Sheila and the down-to-earth small-town hero is wonderfully etched. Shreve creates a little world, peoples it with believable characters, and puts them through agonizing and joyful moments without a false note or a dissonant figure of speech.
Brigitte Weeks - Washington Post
Rescue is Shreve at her best....Shreve knows love may be intense, life-changing and passionate, but it is never enough. Her characters bruise each other as much as they comfort each other.... Rescue is full of themes Shreve loves: How a moment can change a life; loss and love; forgiveness and pain.
Mary Foster - Associated Press
A paramedic and the troubled young beauty he saves propel Shreve's engrossing latest...With the insistent thrum of life-and-death EMT calls as background, Shreve's vividly told tale captures the deep-seated fears of mortality and loneliness that can drive us to test the bounds of family and forgiveness.
Joanna Powell - People
In Shreve's smooth if unsurprising latest (after A Change in Altitude), EMT Peter Webster is drawn to a woman he rescues at the scene of a one-car drunk driving accident. Webster is well intentioned, but alcoholic Sheila, with her dangerous history, could prove beyond his efforts to save her, though the two embark on an affair that evolves into marriage and parenthood with the birth of their daughter, Rowan. Sheila's drinking, meanwhile, escalates until she causes another accident, this time with young Rowan in the car, causing Webster to send Sheila away to avoid jail time. Years later, with not a word from long-gone Sheila, Rowan is a typically turmoil-ridden high school senior—moody, her grades slipping, drinking—and her tribulations prompt Webster to reach out to Sheila to help his daughter. Webster and Sheila are more type than character—good-hearted man, damaged woman incapable of love—and the paramedic rescue scenes feel mostly like opportunities for Shreve to show off her research. Still, the story runs like a well-oiled machine and should sate the author's fans.
Publishers Weekly
Shreve's 11th work of fiction, following A Change in Altitude (2009) centers on rookie paramedic Pete Webster, whose life is irrevocably changed when he becomes romantically involved with Sheila, a woman he rescues from a car wreck. Shreve displays her talent for research through her emphasis on Pete's work as an emergency medical technician and once again displays her ability to create engaging characters. Narrator Dennis Holland, meanwhile, does an excellent job of voicing Pete; Sheila; their teenage daughter, Rowan; and several minor characters in a seamless manner that allows for Shreve's superb storytelling to shine through. Shreve's many fans and all appreciators of good fiction will be pleased. —Gloria Maxwell, Metropolitan Community Coll.-Penn Valley Lib., Kansas City, MO
Library Journal
The prolific Shreve brings her customary care to this thoroughly absorbing, perfectly paced domestic drama. Alternating between the life-and-death scenarios Pete encounters on the job and the fraught family tension between father and daughter, Shreve pulls readers right into her story. —Joanne Wilkson
Booklist
In Shreve's latest (A Change in Altitude, 2009, etc.), an EMT medic falls in love with a woman he saves and ends up raising their child alone. At 21, (Peter) Webster has just begun a career as an EMT in Hartstone, Vt., where he still lives with his parents, when he's called to the scene of a one car smashup. Despite himself, Webster is drawn to the victim, Sheila, and breaks protocol to seek her out. Drunk when she crashed, Sheila is a lovely 24-year-old from Chelsea, Mass., running away from her abusive cop lover. She is also a pool hustler who has lived by her wits all her life. Webster's not sure she genuinely loves him the way he loves her, but ultimately he doesn't care. When she becomes pregnant, he puts aside his plans to buy the land he's dreamed of owning and marries her. Despite misgivings, his parents are supportive, and their baby daughter Rowan is a delight. At first life seems to be perfect for the young couple. But Webster begins to see signs that Sheila is drinking again as he confides in both his parents and his partner at work. The marriage turns rocky as Sheila spirals down. The crisis occurs when she drives drunk, with Rowan in town, and causes an accident with injuries to both Rowan and the other driver. To avoid jail, she agrees to leave Rowan with Webster and disappear. Every woman's ideal of the nurturing male, Webster devotes his life to Rowan. Eighteen years later, Rowan is a high-school senior, and the joy of Webster's life. Then her life goes off the rails, in part because she thinks she's inherited Sheila's alcoholism. Webster selflessly tracks down Sheila, who has stopped drinking and become a painter, because he realizes Rowan needs her. A pale novel, heavy on uplift and padded with episodes of Webster responding as an EMT to various crises, but it's hard not to root for such a WASP mensch.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Rowan and Webster seem to have had a good relationship until recently. However, as a single father raising a daughter, Webster has doubts about how well he's done. What kinds of things might Rowan have missed out on, growing up without a mother? To what extent do you think this accounts for her recent behavior?
2. Sheila's daring and devil-may-care attitude is part of what attracts Webster to her, but early on he sees warning signs in her behavior. Is Webster foolish to get romantically involved with her nonetheless, or are attraction and love too strong to be checked by logic? Do you think he believes Sheila will change for him? And if so, is this a reasonable expectation to have of one's lover or spouse?
3. Burrows and Webster get an emergency call from a teenager and her mother, but the situation turns out to be very different from what it seems, with disastrous consequences (49). Do you think they were at fault for the judgment call they made? What would you have done in that situation?
4. When Sheila goes to AA, Webster believes their problems are over: "Now life would be different. He was sure of it" (130). But Sheila soon relapses. Why do you think the program doesn't work for her at this point? Is any part of her effort is sincere, or is she just trying to appease Webster?
5. Webster, Rowan, and Sheila share a picnic breakfast in the woods, but it soon becomes clear that their moods during this outing are very different (134). What does this scene convey about how Sheila and Webster view their relationship, parenthood, and their family? Why might their views be so far apart?
6. Sheila tells Webster, "You were my best shot .... [at] safety. You exude safety" (118). Why is Webster so insulted by this statement? What do you think Sheila means by it?
7. As Rowan starts to act out, Webster uses different strategies: confronting her, ignoring the behavior, even seeking help from an unlikely source. But none of these have the desired effect. How might he have coped differently? Or do you think nothing he could have done would have worked?
8. Why does Sheila react the way she does when Webster first comes to see her? Did you expect her to behave differently? What might she have wanted to say to Webster that she held herself back from saying?
9. Initially, Webster chooses not to tell Rowan the whole story about how Sheila left. Why do you think he withholds "one important fact" (186)? Is he right to do so? Would have changed Rowan's outlook if he had told her the truth from the outset?
10. Sheila and Webster blame themselves and each other for Sheila's departure. Do they share the blame equally or is one of them more responsible than the other? Is Sheila at fault because she acted recklessly? Should Webster have tried harder to find a solution that kept their family intact?
11. Sheila has missed many years of Rowan's life. To what extent do you think true reconciliation between Rowan and Sheila is possible? Is the role of "mother" something irrevocable or, as Webster says, do you "have to earn the title of mother" (222)?
12. The first time Rowan and Sheila meet again, Webster observes that there is "No mention yet of abandonment or guilt. Anger or remorse. That will come..."(274). If you were Rowan, what would you want to say to Sheila? And in Sheila's place, what would you want to tell Rowan?
13. How does the theme of "rescue" play out in the novel? Is it possible to rescue another person, even when they refuse help? Do we have a responsibility to try to rescue our loved ones? If so, is there a limit to that responsibility?
14. Imagine the characters' lives a year after the end of the novel. What do you think the shape of this family will be?
(Questions from the author's website.)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway, 1940
Simon & Schuster
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684830483
Summary
High in the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There he finds the intense comradeship of war. And there he finds Maria who has escaped from Franco’s rebels
More
Robert Jordan, a Spanish professor from Montana serving with Loyalist guerrilla forces during the Spanish Civil War, is guided by the old man Anselmo to Pablo's guerrilla band in the mountains above a bridge which Jordan must blow up when the Loyalist offensive begins. Pablo, aware that Jordan's mission will invite fascist forces, refuses at first to participate, but relents, returning with additional men and horses shortly before the mission begins.
Knowing that the fascists are aware of the offensive, Jordan sends a message to General Golz, hoping the offensive will be canceled, but the message arrives too late. Jordan blows the bridge, and Anselmo is killed by flying steel. As the group attempts escape, Jordan is seriously injured, and Maria, having been told by Jordan that he will always be with her, leaves with the survivors while Jordan remains behind, waiting for death. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 21, 1899
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois
• Death—July 02, 1961
• Where—Ketchum, Idaho
• Education—Oak Park & River Forest High School
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1952; Nobel Prize, 1954
Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer in the twentieth century, and for his efforts he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway wrote in short, declarative sentences and was known for his tough, terse prose. His main protagonists were always men and women of courage and conviction, who suffered unseen scars, both physical and emotional.
Hemingway was born July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. After graduation from high school, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked briefly for the Kansas City Star. Failing to qualify for the United States Army because of poor eyesight, he enlisted with the American Red Cross to drive ambulances in Italy. He was severely wounded on the Austrian front on July 9, 1918. Following recuperation in a Milan hospital, he returned home and became a freelance writer for the Toronto Star.
In December of 1921, he sailed to France and joined an expatriate community of writers and artists in Paris while continuing to write for the Toronto Star. He began his fiction career with "little magazines" and small presses, which led to a volume of short stories, In Our Time (1925).
Then, as a novelist, he gained international fame: The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) established Hemingway as the most important and influential fiction writer of his generation. He covered the Spanish Civil War, portraying it in fiction in his brilliant novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, (1940), which continued to affirm his extraordinary career. He subsequently covered World War II.
Hemingway's highly publicized life gave him unrivaled celebrity as a literary figure. He became an authority on the subjects of his art: trout fishing, bullfighting, big-game hunting, and deep-sea fishing, and the cultures of the regions in which he set his work—France, Italy, Spain, Cuba, and Africa.
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and was instrumental in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954. Hemingway died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
This is the best book Ernest hemingway has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest. It will, I think, be one of the major novels in American literature.... [T]his is a book filled with the imminence of death, and the manner of man's meeting it;...in it Hemngway has struck universal chords and he has struck them vibrantly...[yet] it is not a depressing book but an uplifting book.
New York Times (11/20/1940)
1. Is Pablo opposed to blowing the bridge because he is a coward, as Pilar says, or is Pablo, himself, correct when he says he "has a tactical sense"? Why does Jordan agree with Pablo's reference to "the seriousness of this" (p. 54)? Is Agustín correct when he calls Pablo "very smart" (p. 94)?
2. Was the communist effort to eliminate God successful? What does Anselmo's view of killing suggest about the limitations of dogma? What does he mean when he says of the bridge sentries, "It is only orders that come between us" (pp. 192-193)? What is implied when Anselmo says soldiers should atone and cleanse themselves after the war?
3. "Time" is a major theme in For Whom the Bell Tolls. How does Pilar's awareness of time affect her attitude toward Robert Jordan's and Maria's relationship? What conclusions does Robert Jordan draw about his own life during the very short time he spends with Maria?
4. Pablo calls his compatriots "illusioned people" (p. 215). Does this remark prove to be true? Does Jordan expose illusions? Does For Whom the Bell Tolls suggest that because of their illusions and vulnerability to exploitation the victims of the war were the entire Spanish people?
5. Does the epigraph, an excerpt from John Donne's Devotions XVII, convey the theme of For Whom the Bell Tolls? What is that theme? What scenes in the novel develop the sentiment of the epigraph? What is the narrator telling us when he says that Robert Jordan, lying on the forest floor waiting for death, is "completely integrated" (p. 471)?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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