Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Ransom Riggs, 2011
Quirk Publishing
382 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594746031
Summary
A mysterious island.... An abandoned orphanage.... A strange collection of very curious photographs.
t all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience.
As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children.
As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.
A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows. (From the publisher.)
This book, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011) is the first book in the Peculiar Children Series. Hollow City (2014) is the second, and Library of Souls (2016), is the third.
Tim Burton's film adaption of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children was released in 2016. It stars Eva Green and Asa Butterfield.
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in Florida, USA
• Education—Kenyon College; University of
Southern California
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Ransom Riggs grew up in Florida but now makes his home in the land of peculiar children—Los Angeles. Along the way he earned degrees from Kenyon College and the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television, got married, and made some award-winning short films. He moonlights as a blogger and travel writer, and his series of travel essays, Strange Geographies, can be found at mentalfloss.com or via ransomriggs.com. This is his first novel. (From the publisher.)
In his words
I was born on a 200-year-old farm in rural maryland, where at the tender age of five I decided that I definitely wanted to be a farmer when I grew up, because being a farmer meant driving tractors. Then, partially as a result of my new ambition, my mom moved us far away to Florida, where there were relatively few farms but lots and lots of old people and not very much for kids to do.
In retrospect, it was precisely because there wasn’t a lot to do, and because the internet didn’t exist and cable TV was only like twelve channels back then, that I was forced to make my own fun and my own stories—and that’s what I’m still doing, only now I get paid for it. So thanks, sleepy Florida fishing village!
I grew up writing stories and making videos in the backyard with my friends. I knew I wanted to do one or both of those things in some professional capacity when I got older, but I didn’t know how. For three summers during high school I attended the University of Virginia’s Young Writer’s Workshop, and I still consider it one of the shaping experiences of my life. I met so many great, brilliant people, and it convinced me that it was possible to make a life for myself as a writer.
I also knew I wanted to make movies. So I compromised, and went to Kenyon College first to study English, then moved out to Los Angeles to go to film school at the University of Southern California. Looking back, that was a lot of time and money spent on school, but I don’t regret it at all Being part of those creative communities gave me lots of time to practice writing things and making movies before I had to go out and try to do either of those things professionally.
So now I do a lot of different things, which can make for a rambling and confused-sounding answer when I am asked, as I often am in work-obsessed Los Angeles, “So...what do you do? But I will attempt to answer this question, in list form:
• I write books First, a non-fiction book about Sherlock Holmes. Then a novel about peculiar children (2011). Then a book of found photographs with writing on them, coming out in 2012. I'm fairly certain there are more novels on the way. I can feel them clanking around half-formed in my brain.
• I make movies. I went to film school and made a lot of shorts there, then after I graduated I got jobs making short and some book trailers, too, like this and this. I also write screenplays and make the occasional video blog.
• I word-blog for mentalfloss.com. My favorite column is a series of photo-travel-essays called Strange Geographies. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Debut novelist Ransom Riggs liberally sprinkles his book with a series of vintage photos around which he has constructed his plot. Depending on your taste, you will find the photos either totally cool or kind of creepy, but either way they feed the book’s atmospherics and help to convincingly set much of it in a time loop—an odd chasm in the space-time continuum in which the day Sept. 3, 1940, plays over and over again/
Marjorie Kehe - Christian Science Monitor
"Peculiar" doesn’t even begin to cover it. Riggs’ chilling, wondrous novel is already headed to the movies.
People
Riggs deftly moves between fantasy and reality, prose and photography to create an enchanting and at times positively terrifying story.
Associated Press
Though technically a children's book, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is more Grimm's than Disney, and Riggs images, dropped like bread crumbs, could lead audiences of any age happily down the path of its spellbinding tale.
Florida Times-Union
Riggs's atmospheric first novel concerns 16-year-old Jacob, a tightly wound but otherwise ordinary teenager who is "unusually susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies, and Seeing Things That Aren't Really There." When Jacob's grandfather, Abe, a WWII veteran, is savagely murdered, Jacob has a nervous breakdown, in part because he believes that his grandfather was killed by a monster that only they could see. On his psychiatrist's advice, Jacob and his father travel from their home in Florida to Cairnholm Island off the coast of Wales, which, during the war, housed Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Abe, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, lived there before enlisting, and the mysteries of his life and death lead Jacob back to that institution. Nearly 50 unsettling vintage photographs appear throughout, forming the framework of this dark but empowering tale, as Riggs creates supernatural backstories and identities for those pictured in them (a boy crawling with bees, a girl with untamed hair carrying a chicken). It's an enjoyable, eccentric read, distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters. (Ages 12 up.)
Publishers Weekly
Sixteen-year-old Jacob Portman no longer believes the stories his grandfather told him when he was a little boy. These are obviously fairy tales about children with mysterious abilities, such as a girl who could levitate and a boy with bees inside him, and not real memories from his grandfather's childhood. Grandpa's sepia-toned photographs of his strange friends also seem fake to Jacob. However, when he gets a chance to visit the island where the stories took place, he can't resist delving into his grandfather's past. Could these odd children really have existed? Verdict: An original work that defies categorization, this first novel should appeal to readers who like quirky fantasies. Suitable for both adults and a YA audience. Riggs includes many vintage photographs that add a critical touch of the peculiar to his unusual tale. —Laurel Bliss, San Diego State Univ. Lib
Library Journal
A haunting and out-of-the-ordinary read, debut author Ransom Rigg’s first-person narration is convincing and absorbing, and every detail he draws our eye to is deftly woven into an unforgettable whole. Interspersed with photos throughout, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a truly atmospheric novel with plot twists, turns, and surprises that will delight readers of any age
Amazon Editors
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 Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children:
1. What effect did the photographs have on how you experienced this novel? In fact, what was your reading experience of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children? How did it make you feel? Were you disturbed...or fascinated...or something else? Did the book hold your interest?
2. What's wrong with Jacob Portman? What's his problem?
3. What about Abe Portman, what kind of character is he? What kind of a world does he create in his stories for young Jacob? Why do the stories intrigue Jacob so much?
4. As he moves into adolescence, why does Jacob begin to doubt the veracity of his grandfather's stories? In what way does he think they may be connected to Abe's struggle under the Nazis?
5. What makes Jacob think his grandfather's death is more sinister than what the official version claims.
6. Talk about the house in Wales. When Jacob first lays eyes on it, he observes that it "was no refuge from monsters, but a monster itself." Would you say the house serves as a setting to the story...or is its role something else—a character, perhaps?
7. What are the atmospherics used to build suspense in the novel. Find some examples of how the author uses language to instill unease, fear, and tension.
8. Are you able to make sense of the "after," the time loop? Can you explain it? Do you enjoy the way Riggs plays with time in his novel?
9. Were you surprised by the direction that the story took? Were you expecting it to go elsewhere? Were you able to suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the story's turn of events?
10. Talk, of course, about the peculiar children. Which of their oddities and personalities do you find most intriguing?
11. Some readers have complained about the inconsistency of the narrative voice, that it was perhaps too sophisticated for a young boy, even an adolescent? Do you agree, or disagree? Does the narrative voice change during the course of the novel?
12. In what way can this book be seen as a classic quest story—a young hero who undertakes a difficult journey and is transformed in the process? Do you see parallels with other fantasy works involving young people?
13. Does the end satisfy? Are loose ends tied up....or left hanging? This is the first book of a planned series. Will you read future installments? Where do you think Riggs will take his readers next?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Men and Dogs
Katie Crouch, 2010
Little, Brown & Co.
279 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316002134
Summary
When Hannah Legare was 11, her father went on a fishing trip in the Charleston harbor and never came back. And while most of the town and her family accepted Buzz's disappearance, Hannah remained steadfastly convinced of his imminent return.
Twenty years later Hannah's new life in San Francisco is unraveling. Her marriage is on the rocks, her business is bankrupt. After a disastrous attempt to win back her husband, she ends up back at her mother's home to "rest up," where she is once again sucked into the mystery of her missing father.
Suspecting that those closest are keeping secrets—including Palmer, her emotionally closed, well-mannered brother and Warren, the beautiful boyfriend she left behind—Hannah sets out on an uproarious, dangerous quest that will test the whole family's concepts of loyalty and faith. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—Charleston, South Carolina, USA
• Education—Brown University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Sewanee Walter Dakin and MacDowell Fellowships
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
Katie Crouch is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Girls in Trucks and Men and Dogs (2010)
Her writing has also appeared in the New York Observer, Tin House, Glamour, and McSweeney's. She received her M.F.A. at Columbia University, and was awarded a Sewanee Walter Dakin Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives in San Francisco. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Wonderful.... Despite her quick wit and caustic humor, Hannah is a haunted figure—she's never come to terms with the loss of her father, who disappeared without a trace on a fishing trip, presumed to have drowned, when she was 11 years old.... Crouch is too smart a writer to craft a damaged-woman-goes-home-again-and-finds-healing-and-redemption story. She knows that real life all too often disappoints.... Men and Dogs is an absorbing mystery.... Yet it's a compelling family drama, too....
Carmela Ciuraru - San Francisco Chronicle
Prepare to have your heart broken while laughing out loud at this breathtaking, scathingly sardonic novel. From her opening line—"Two days before Hannah's father disappeared, he took her out in his boat"—Crouch grabs you and never lets go.... In the hands of a less adept author, this tightly wound tale of one woman's unraveling and redemption might seem more grim than guffaw-worthy. But with Crouch in charge, the reader is assured of a reflective yet riotous ride." Four stars.
Meredith Maran - People
Crouch's accomplished sophomore novel kicks off with a flashback: 20-odd years ago, Buzz Legare vanished while on a fishing trip. The fallout of his disappearance and presumed death appears in his 30-something children: Hannah drinks too much, her business is failing, and her husband has kicked her out after her repeated adultery. Hannah's gay brother, Palmer, refuses to let anyone get too close—he's ready to end his yearlong relationship when his partner brings up the idea of adopting a baby. After Hannah injures herself trying to break into her husband's apartment, she heads home to Charleston, S.C., to get her life back on track, but instead finds herself pursuing the past. Damaged and vulnerable, she zigzags through her past—an old boyfriend, questions about her parents' fidelity, and finally facing down where her unwillingness to accept love has gotten her. There's nothing unique about the premise—woman in crisis goes home and discovers herself by exhuming the past—but Crouch (Girls in Trucks) handles it deftly; her dialogue is snappy, the situations darkly funny, Hannah and Palmer are unlikable but sympathetic, and there's just enough mystery to keep the pages turning.
Publishers Weekly
When Hannah Legare was a young girl, her father disappeared on a routine fishing trip. Years later, Hannah finally confronts her past when she is forced to recuperate at home in Charleston, SC, after a drunken accident in San Francisco. This is not Hannah's best moment. Her marriage is failing, owing to her serial adultery; her sex-toy business is tanking; she drinks too much; and she holds her mother, stepfather, and brother Palmer at a distinct distance. By digging into the past—her father's disappearance, the state of her parents' marriage, and unfinished business with her high school boyfriend—Hannah doesn't really discover the answers but learns just enough about love and herself that she can face her present reality. Verdict: Hannah is not exactly a likable character, but she reflects enough humor in her brokenness to be memorable. Crouch's second novel sounds formulaic, but as in her best-selling Girls in Trucks, she writes with a dark, twisty, but approachable Southern charm. —Andrea Griffith
Library Journal
The collapse of her marriage, not to mention a three-story fall, sends a woman back home to Charleston, S.C., to investigate her father's disappearance, in Crouch's sardonic second (Girls in Trucks, 2008). Hannah, 35, and her now-estranged husband Jon are sudden San Francisco millionaires—their online sex-toy business has taken off. Her drinking and infidelity have driven Jon away. Hannah suffered her most intractable emotional wound 24 years before, the day her father Buzz, a successful doctor, motored out alone into Charleston harbor, accompanied only by the family dog, Tucker. He never showed up for his son Palmer's soccer game that afternoon. His boat was found, containing only Tucker. Buzz's body was never recovered. His beautiful wife, Daisy, moved on and married DeWitt, Charleston's wealthiest man. Hannah has always compared her looks—she resembles her father, whose features look too big on her—unfavorably to her mother's. After drunkenly scaling Jon's apartment building to prove her love, and losing her footing thanks to a yapping terrier, she wakes up in the hospital. Jon and Daisy give her a choice: recuperation in Charleston, or rehab. Rooting among old photos in DeWitt's mansion, she discovers some unsettling clues. One snapshot shows Daisy and Buzz at a party with a group of stoned, hippie-like friends. Hovering in the background is DeWitt. But Daisy claimed not to have met DeWitt until after Buzz vanished. Palmer, a veterinarian, is quarreling with his boyfriend Tom over whether they want a child—as if gay life in Charleston wasn't challenging enough. In his mind, Palmer obsessively revisits his father's last day— was Buzz driven to suicide after accidentally spotting Palmerin flagrante with another boy? Only Hannah still thinks Buzz may be alive. But if he is, why did he abandon her? Although it's believable, one senses Hannah's quest for Buzz is merely a pretext—self-knowledge and redefinition of family are the real goals here. Sunny outlook with enough clouds to keep it interesting.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Hannah was a girl, she idolized her father. Which of his traits do you think had the greatest effect on her? Do you see some of Buzz Legare in Hannah as an adult?
2. What do you think really happened to Buzz? How would Hannah’s life have been different if he had been confirmed drowned soon after he went missing?
3. How does Hannah’s obsession over what might have happened to her father shape the person she becomes? Do you think the absence of her father contributed to her “fall” in some way?
4. Some of Hannah’s trouble might be said to be the result of self-sabotage. Could you relate to the way that she pushed her own marriage to the limit?
5. Palmer is ambivalent about taking his relationship to the next level with Tom. How would you compare their situation to Hannah and Jon’s relationship?
6. Do you think Tom is justified in being upset when Palmer balks at the idea of adoption?
7. When Hannah returns home after her fire-escape catastrophe, why is Palmer so reluctant to see her? What do you make of Hannah’s relationship with her mother, Daisy?
8. At first, Hannah has little patience or respect for her stepfather, DeWitt. If you were her, would you feel the same way? How does her opinion of him change?
9. Which of the book’s main characters do you most relate to?
10. Back home, Hannah seeks out her first love, Warren, and she’s surprised that he’s become a minister. What do you make of the paths that each of them has chosen? What might their lives have been like if they had stayed together?
11. Palmer had a fraught relationship with his childhood friend, Shawn. Could things have fallen out differently for them? What do you make of their reunion, decades later?
12. Warren tells Hannah that, despite the trouble in her relationships, “You’re the most faithful person I know.” What do you think of his statement?
13. At one point Palmer rises to the defense of canines when Hannah says, “Men are such...dogs.” Who do you side with? What’s your take on the book’s title?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Shanghai Girls
Lisa See, 2009
Random House
314 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812980530
Summary
In 1937, Shanghai is the Paris of Asia, a city of great wealth and glamour, the home of millionaires and beggars, gangsters and gamblers, patriots and revolutionaries, artists and warlords. Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, twenty-one-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, they couldn’t be more different: Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid. Both are beautiful, modern, and carefree...until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides.
As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, Pearl and May set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the Chinese countryside, in and out of the clutch of brutal soldiers, and across the Pacific to the shores of America. In Los Angeles they begin a fresh chapter, trying to find love with the strangers they have married, brushing against the seduction of Hollywood, and striving to embrace American life even as they fight against discrimination, brave Communist witch hunts, and find themselves hemmed in by Chinatown’s old ways and rules.
At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection, but like sisters everywhere they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other, but each knows exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other the most. Along the way they face terrible sacrifices, make impossible choices, and confront a devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel hold fast to who they are–Shanghai girls. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 18, 1955
• Where—Paris, France
• Education—B.A., Loyola Marymount University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of Shanghai Girls; Peony in Love; Snow Flower and the Secret Fan; Flower Net (an Edgar Award nominee); The Interior; and Dragon Bones, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir On Gold Mountain. The Organization of Chinese American Women named her the 2001 National Woman of the Year. She lives in Los Angeles. (From the publisher.)
More
At first glance, Lisa See would not seem to be a likely candidate for literary voice of Chinese-American women. With her flaming red hair and freckled complexion, she hardly adheres to any stereotypical conceptions of what an Asian-American woman should look like, however, her familial background has given her roots in Chinese culture that have fueled her eloquent, elegant, and exciting body of work.
See grew up in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles. Although she is only 1/8 Chinese, her upbringing provided her with a powerful connection to that fraction of herself. "I really grew up in this very traditional, old Chinese family," she revealed in an interview with Barnes & Noble.com. "It was very traditional, but also quite magical in a lot of ways, because I really was in a very different culture then how I looked."
See's Chinese background was not the only aspect of her family that affected the course her life has taken. She also comes from a long line of writers and novelists. Her somewhat morose relatives initially led her to believe that writing must be the result of suffering and pain, which turned her off from literary pursuits at first. Ironically, despite her strong family roots, See only decided to try her hand at writing as a means of embarking on a lifestyle without roots.
I knew three things. I never wanted to get married, I never wanted to have children, and I only wanted to live out of a suitcase. How am I gonna do it? And I was really thinking about it, and then one morning, I woke up, and it was truly like a light bulb went off —‘Oh, I could be a writer!' Many, many years later, here I am, married, I have children, [and] I am a writer.
In the wake of this unexpected epiphany, Lisa See began work on her first book On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family. This highly detailed family history charted the events that led her great-grandfather Fong See to become the godfather of her Chinatown neighborhood and the 100-year-old patriarch of her family. See interviewed close to 100 of her relatives while researching the book that both gave her a clearer portrait of how her racially mixed family developed and broke her into the publishing business.
See then went on to explore other aspects of both Chinese and American culture via fiction. She followed her debut with a series of popular political thrillers set in China and featuring American attorney David Stark. Her novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan abandons Stark and his pursuit of justice for the time being with a tale that reaches much further back into Chinese culture, and more specifically, the subordinate role women have traditionally played in that culture. This more personal novel scored accolades while also further solidifying her role as a significant Chinese-American writer. And See's Peony in Love (2007) is a jarring historical novel set against the backdrop of an early-17th-century Chinese opera.
See's position in the Chinese-American community has also extended beyond her writing. She was honored by the Organization of Chinese American Women as National Woman of the Year in 2001 and is also responsible for designing a walking tour of her Chinatown home in L.A. Her devotion to that apparently-small, but actually-vast, 1/8 of her ethnicity proves that well-worn adage about never judging a book by looking at its cover. (From the author's website.)
Extras
• I never wanted to be a writer. My mother and my grandfather were both writers. When I was a kid, they both took the position that writing was about suffering and pain, so you can see why I didn't want to be a writer. There came a time when I was about twenty and living in Greece, and I knew three things: I didn't want to get married, I didn't want to have children, and I only wanted to live out of a suitcase. But how was I going to support myself and how was this ever going to happen? One morning I woke up and it was like a light bulb went off: ‘Ah, I could be a writer.' Within twenty-four hours of returning back to the States I had my first two magazine assignments. But if you've been reading this at all closely, you know that I got married and had children. And thank God, because I would have been a pretty boring person and not a very good writer if I didn't have those three people in my life. But I still do love to live out of a suitcase and have been writing most of these answers on a plane from Shanghai to San Francisco.
• When asked about what book influenced her as a writer, here is her response:
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. I read this novel just before I started writing On Gold Mountain. I loved the way Stegner combined family story with history. I know that this book has come under severe criticism in recent years for possible plagiarism. Nevertheless, it inspired and continues to inspire me. (Bio and interview from a 2005 Barnes and Noble interview.)
Book Reviews
Lisa See's Shanghai Girls is much loftier than its cover art's stunning portrait....The author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan has written a broadly sweeping tale that opens in Shangai in 1937. he detail is thoughtful and intricate in ways that hardly qualify ththis book as the stuff of chick lit.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Examining the chains of friendship within the confines of family, See’s kaleidoscopic saga transits from the barbaric horrors of Japanese occupation to the sobering indignities suffered by foreigners in 1930s Hollywood while offering a buoyant and lustrous paean to the bonds of sisterhood.
Booklist
See (Snow Flower; Peony in Love) explores tradition, the ravages of war and the importance of family in her excellent latest. Pearl and her younger sister, May, enjoy an upper-crust life in 1930s Shanghai, until their father reveals that his gambling habit has decimated the family's finances and to make good on his debts, he has sold both girls to a wealthy Chinese-American as wives for his sons. Pearl and May have no intention of leaving home, but after Japanese bombs and soldiers ravage their city and both their parents disappear, the sisters head for California, where their husbands-to-be live and where it soon becomes apparent that one of them is hiding a secret that will alter each of their fates. As they adjust to marriage with strangers and the challenges of living in a foreign land, Pearl and May learn that long-established customs can provide comfort in unbearable times. See's skillful plotting and richly drawn characters immediately draw in the reader, covering 20 years of love, loss, heartbreak and joy while delivering a sobering history lesson. While the ending is ambiguous, this is an accomplished and absorbing novel.
Publishers Weekly
In prewar 1930s Shanghai, carefree sisters Pearl Chin and younger, prettier May are the "beautiful girls" whose images on posters beckon viewers to buy products. They openly scoff at their parents' superstitious, old-world ways, but they soon learn that the good life is but an illusion. The Japanese army's brutal invasion of the city makes their lives as beautiful girls impossible. Their businessman father loses everything to the ruthless mob, and to pay off his debts he forces his daughters into arranged marriages to Chinese men living in the United States. See is masterly in her powerful depictions of the prejudice and harsh treatment the sisters encounter as they try to assimilate into the strange new world of Los Angeles. Possibly the best book yet from the author of Peony in Love; highly recommended.
Library Journal
Two sisters escape war-ravaged Shanghai, only to face discrimination and the threat of deportation in the United States. See's latest fictional exploration of the lives of Chinese women begins in 1937 Shanghai, a cosmopolitan city under imminent threat of Japanese invasion. As oblivious to rumors of their beloved city's collapse as they are to their family's circumstances, Pearl Chin and her younger sister May continue to shop, frequent nightclubs and pose for illustrator Z.G.'s advertising calendars featuring "Beautiful Girls." However, Papa Chin, having lost his fortune to gambling debts, has sold his daughters into marriage to Sam and Vern, sons of Chinese-American entrepreneur Old Man Louie. After hasty weddings (only Pearl's union, with Sam, is consummated), the brides refuse to accompany their husbands to California. When Shanghai is bombed and Papa abruptly disappears, the women and their mother join the stream of refugees fleeing the Japanese on foot. Along the way, Pearl and her mother are brutally raped by Japanese soldiers, while May hides. Their mother does not survive, but the Chins reach Hong Kong and embark for the United States, having decided, in desperation, to join their husbands. At San Francisco's notorious Angel Island immigrant-internment center, May, pregnant by a boyfriend, prolongs the sisters' already extended quarantine until she is able to give birth in secrecy. Pearl claims May's daughter Joy as her own and Sam's. Once reunited with their spouses in L.A.'s Chinese district, the former Shanghai princesses must acclimatize themselves to a life of drudgery, toiling in the Louie family's curio shops and restaurants. Despite engrossing complications involving immigration issues and the impact of the '50s Red Scare on Chinese-Americans, the Chinatown section, spanning 20 years, seems overlong. The final chapters, however, wherein Z.G.'s Beautiful Girl artwork resurfaces as Maoist propaganda and the FBI stalks the family, are worth the wait. The close suggests See's next setting may be the People's Republic, a development sure to please her readership.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Pearl’s narration is unique because of its level, calm tone throughout— even when the events she describes are horrific. One is reminded of Wordsworth’s reference to “emotion recollected in tranquility.” It is almost as if Pearl is writing in a diary. What was Lisa See trying to accomplish in setting up this counterpoint between her tone and her narrative?
2. Pearl is a Dragon and May is a Sheep. Do you think the two sisters, in their actions in the novel, are true to their birth signs?
3. Which sister is smarter? Which is more beautiful?
4. Each sister believes that her parents loved the other sister more. Who is right about this? Why?
5. Pearl says that parents die, husbands and children can leave, but sisters are for life. Does that end up being true for Pearl? If you have a sister, to what extent does the relationship between Pearl and May speak to your own experience? What’s the difference between a relationship that’s “just like sisters” and a relationship between real sisters? Is there anything your sister could do that would cause an irreparable breach?
6. Z.G. talks about ai kuo, the love for your country, and ai jen, the emotion you feel for the person you love. How do these ideas play out in the novel?
7. Shanghai Girls makes a powerful statement about the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants in the United States. Were you surprised about any of the details in the novel related to this theme?
8. How would you describe the relationship between Pearl and May? How does the fact that both are, in a sense, Joy’s mother affect their relationship? Who loves Joy more and how does she show it?
9. Pearl doesn’t come to mother-love easily or naturally. At what point does she begin to claim Joy as her own? How, where, and why does she continue to struggle with the challenges of being a mother? Do you think this is an accurate portrayal of motherhood?
10. There are times when it seems like outside forces conspire against Pearl—leaving China, working in the restaurant, not finding a job after the war, and taking care of Vern. How much of what happens to Pearl is a product of her own choices?
11. Pearl’s attitude toward men and the world in general is influenced by what happened to her in the shack outside Shanghai. To what extent does she find her way to healing by the end of the novel? Did your attitude toward Old Man Louie change? How do you feel about Sam and his relationship with Pearl and Joy? Did your impression of him change as the novel progressed?
12. The novel begins with Pearl saying, “I am not a person of importance” (p. 3). After Yen-yen dies, Pearl comments: “Her funeral is small. After all, she was not a person of importance, rather just a wife and mother” (p. 246). How do you react to comments like these?
13. Speaking of Yen-yen, Pearl notes: “When we’re packing, Yen-yen says she’s tired. She sits down on the couch in the main room and dies” (p. 246). Why does Pearl describe Yen-yen’s death in such an abrupt way?
14. After Joy points out the differences in the way Z.G. painted her mother and aunt in the Communist propaganda posters, May says, “Everything always returns to the beginning” (p. 267). Pearl has her idea of what May meant, but what do you think May really meant? And what is Pearl’s understanding of this saying at the end of the novel?
15. Near the end of Shanghai Girls, May argues that Pearl and Sam have withdrawn into a world of fear and isolation, not taking advantage of the opportunities open to them. Do you agree with May that much of Pearl’s sadness and isolation is self-imposed? Why or why not?
16. How do clothes define Pearl and May in different parts of the story? How do the sisters use clothes to manipulate others?
17. How does food serve as a gateway to memory in the novel? How does it illustrate culture and tradition both in the novel and in your own family?
18. What influence—if any—do Mama’s beliefs have on Pearl? How do they evolve over time?
19. Pearl encounters a lot of racism, but she also holds many racist views herself. Is she a product of her time? Do her attitudes change during the course of the story?
20. What role does place—Shanghai, Angel Island, China City, and Chinatown—serve in the novel? What do you think Lisa See was trying to say about “home”?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307455475
Summary
The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners—a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life—has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.
Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers . . .
Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away . . .
By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive. (From the publisher.)
This is the second book in Atwood's dystopian trilogy: the first is Oryx and Crake (2003); the third is MaddAddam (2013).
Author Bio
• Birth—November 18, 1939
• Where—Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A. Radcliffe; Ph.D., Harvard University
• Awards—Governor General's Award; Booker Prize; Giller Award
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Canada
Early life
Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Atwood is the second of three children of Margaret Dorothy (nee Killam), a former dietitian and nutritionist, and Carl Edmund Atwood, an entomologist. Due to her father’s ongoing research in forest entomology, Atwood spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of Northern Quebec and traveling back and forth between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie, and Toronto. She did not attend school full-time until she was in grade 8. She became a voracious reader of literature, Dell pocketbook mysteries, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Canadian animal stories, and comic books. She attended Leaside High School in Leaside, Toronto, and graduated in 1957.
Atwood began writing at the age of six and realized she wanted to write professionally when she was 16. In 1957, she began studying at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, where she published poems and articles in Acta Victoriana, the college literary journal. Her professors included Jay Macpherson and Northrop Frye. She graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in English (honours) and a minor in philosophy and French.
In late 1961, after winning the E.J. Pratt Medal for her privately printed book of poems, Double Persephone, she began graduate studies at Harvard's Radcliffe College with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. She obtained a master's degree (MA) from Radcliffe in 1962 and pursued further graduate studies at Harvard University for two years but did not finish her dissertation, “The English Metaphysical Romance." She has taught at the University of British Columbia (1965), Sir George Williams University in Montreal (1967–68), the University of Alberta (1969–70), York University in Toronto (1971–72), the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (1985), where she was visiting M.F.A. Chair, and New York University, where she was Berg Professor of English.
Personal life
In 1968, Atwood married Jim Polk; they were divorced in 1973. She formed a relationship with fellow novelist Graeme Gibson soon after and moved to a farm near Alliston, Ontario, north of Toronto, where their daughter was born in 1976. The family returned to Toronto in 1980.
Other genres
While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has also published fifteen books of poetry. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works.
Atwood has also produced several children's books, including Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995) and Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes (2003)—delicious alliterative delights that introduce a wealth of new vocabulary to young readers
Speculative fiction vs. sci-fic
The Handmaid's Tale received the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987. The award is given for the best science fiction novel that was first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. It was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, and the 1987 Prometheus Award, both science fiction awards.
Atwood was at one time offended at the suggestion that The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, insisting to the UK's Guardian that they were speculative fiction instead: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen." She told the Book of the Month Club: "Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians."
She clarified her meaning on the difference between speculative and science fiction, admitting that others use the terms interchangeably: "For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do.... [S]peculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand and that takes place on Planet Earth." She said that science fiction narratives give a writer the ability to explore themes in ways that realistic fiction cannot.
Environmentalism
Although Atwood's politics are commonly described as being left-wing, she has indicated in interviews that she considers herself a Red Tory in the historical sense of the term. Atwood, along with her partner Graeme Gibson, is a member of the Green Party of Canada (GPC) and has strong views on environmental issues. She and Gibson are the joint honorary presidents of the Rare Bird Club within BirdLife International. She has been chair of the Writers' Union of Canada and president of PEN Canada, and is currently a vice president of PEN International. In a Globe and Mail editorial, she urged Canadians to vote for any other party to stop a Conservative majority.
During the debate in 1987 over a free trade agreement between Canada and the United States, Atwood spoke out against the deal, and wrote an essay opposing the agreement.
Atwood celebrated her 70th birthday at a gala dinner at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, marking the final stop of her international tour to promote The Year of the Flood. She stated that she had chosen to attend the event because the city has been home to one of Canada's most ambitious environmental reclamation programs: "When people ask if there's hope (for the environment), I say, if Sudbury can do it, so can you. Having been a symbol of desolation, it's become a symbol of hope." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/17/2013.)
Book Reviews
Atwood is funny and clever, such a good writer and real thinker that there's hardly any point saying that not everything in the novel works. Why should it? A high level of creativity has to let in some chaos…The flaws in The Year of the Flood are part of the pleasure, as they are with human beings, that species so threatened by its own impending suicide and held up here for us to look at, mourn over, laugh at and hope for. Atwood knows how to show us ourselves, but the mirror she holds up to life does more than reflect—it's like one of those mirrors made with mercury that gives us both a deepening and a distorting effect, allowing both the depths of human nature and its potential mutations. We don't know how we will evolve, or if we will evolve at all. The Year of the Flood isn't prophecy, but it is eerily possible.
Jeanette Winterson - New York Times Book Review
Ms. Atwood has loosened up in this volume and given her imagination free rein…By focusing on her characters and their perilous journeys through a nightmare world, she has succeeded in writing a gripping and visceral book that showcases the pure storytelling talents she displayed with such verve in her 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
By its last half The Year of the Flood has turned into a heart-pounding thriller, a desperate Painball game to the death set in an already devastated world. Still, the book regularly undercuts the horrific with touches of comedy…and Atwood superbly captures the voices and attitudes of the serious Adam One, the frivolous Lucerne, the resourceful Toby and the rather simple-minded and fragile Ren. Canada's greatest living novelist undoubtedly knows how to tell a gripping story, as fans of The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale already know. But here there's a serious message, too: Look at what we're doing right now to our world, to nature, to ourselves. If this goes on....
Michael Dirda - Washington Post
(Special Review) In her 2002 speculative novel, Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood depicted a dystopic planet tumbling toward apocalypse. The world she envisaged was in the throes of catastrophic climate change, its wealthy inhabitants dwelling in sterile secure compounds, its poor ones in the dangerous “pleeblands” of decaying inner cities. Mass extinctions had taken place, while genetic experiments had populated the planet with strange new breeds of animal: liobams, Mo'Hairs, rakunks. At the end of the book, we left its central character, Jimmy, in the aftermath of a devastating man-made plague, as he wondered whether to befriend or attack a ragged band of strangers. The novel seemed complete, closing on a moment of suspense, as though Atwood was content simply to hint at the direction life would now take. In her profoundly imagined new book, The Year of the Flood, she revisits that same world and its catastrophe.
Like Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood begins just after the catastrophe and then tracks back in time over the corrupt and degenerate world that preceded it. But while the first novel focused on the privileged elite in the compounds and the morally bankrupt corporations, The Year of the Flood depicts more of the world of the pleebs, an edgy no-man's land inhabited by criminals, sex workers, dropouts and the few individuals who are trying to resist the grip of the corporations.
The novel centers on the lives of Ren and Toby, female members of afundamentalist sect of Christian environmentalists, the God's Gardeners. Led by the charismatic Adam One, whose sermons and eco-hymns punctuate the narrative, the God's Gardeners are preparing for life after the prophesied Waterless Flood. Atwood plays some of their religion for laughs: their hymns have a comically bouncing, churchy rhythm, and we learn that both Ren and Toby have been drawn toward the sect for nonreligious reasons. Yet the gentleness and benignity of the Gardeners is a source of hope as well as humor. As absurd as some of their beliefs appear, Atwood seems to be suggesting that they're a better option than the naked materialism of the corporations.
This is a gutsy and expansive novel, rich with ideas and conceits, but overall it's more optimistic than Oryx and Crake. Its characters have a compassion and energy lacking in Jimmy, the wounded and floating lothario at the previous novel's center.
Each novel can be enjoyed independently of the other, but what's perhaps most impressive is the degree of connection between them. Together, they form halves of a single epic. Characters intersect. Plots overlap. Even the tiniest details tessellate into an intricate whole. In the final pages, we catch up with Jimmy once more, as he waits to encounter the strangers. This time around, Atwood commits herself to a dramatic and hopeful denouement that's in keeping with this novel's spirit of redemption.
Marcel Theroux - Publishers Weekly
Never one to rest on her laurels, famed Canadian author Atwood redeems the word sequel with this brilliant return to the nightmarish future first envisioned in Oryx and Crake. Contrary to expectations, the waterless flood, a biological disaster predicted by a fringe religious group, actually arrives. In its wake, the survivors must rely on their wits to get by, all the while reflecting on what went wrong. Atwood wins major style points here for her framing device, the liturgical year of the God's Gardeners sect. Readers who enjoy suspense will also appreciate the story's shifting viewpoint and nonlinear time line, which result in the gradual revelation of key events and character relationships. Atwood's heroines seem uniformly grim and hollow, but one can hardly expect cheerfulness in the face of the apocalypse, and the hardships of their lives both pre- and postflood are moving and disturbing. VERDICT Another win for Atwood, this dystopian fantasy belongs in the hands of every highbrow sf aficionado and anyone else who claims to possess a social conscience. —Leigh Anne Vrabel, Carnegie Lib. of Pittsburgh
Library Journal
Atwood returns to the post-apocalyptic world she imagined in Oryx and Crake (2003, etc.). In the futuristic year Twenty-Five, the world is run by corporations; genetic experiments include splicing animals like lions and lambs; and the environment is increasingly a wasteland. When the viral "waterless flood," long predicted by Adam One of a religious/environmentalist cult called The Gardeners, decimates the world's human population, there are only a few survivors. At the AnooYoo spa, which she has been managing under a pseudonym to hide from a psychopathic sexual stalker, Toby stays alive using the skills she learned as a longtime Gardener, conserving, foraging and hunting when necessary. Across the city, sex worker Ren survives because she happened to be locked in an isolation room at the Scales and Tales strip club when the virus hit. As Ren and Toby each wonder whether she is the only human left alive, both relive the last 15 years, which shaped their individual fates and led to the apocalypse. Ren knew Toby as one of the Eves, female leaders of The Gardeners, with whom she lived as a child while her mother was having an affair with mysterious renegade member Zeb. Eventually Ren and her mother returned to the HelthWyzer Compound; there teenage Ren fell in love and had her heart broken by Jimmy, protagonist of Oryx and Crake. Ren's best friend Amanda, a street kid adopted by The Gardeners, has also survived. She makes her way to Ren, the two join up with members of a splinter group of Gardeners headed by Zeb, and they all head toward AnooYoo. Unfortunately, not only Gardeners have survived. The women confront evil as well as a demented version of perfection developed by Jimmy'scrazed-genius friend Crake. Atwood wears her politics on her sleeve, but she doesn't shy away from showing the Gardeners' tendency toward self-righteous foolishness. Another stimulating dystopia from this always-provocative author, whose complex, deeply involving characters inhabit a bizarre yet frighteningly believable future.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How does the friendship between Amanda and Ren grow, despite their differences and the restrictions they face? They meet as children. Who was your greatest ally when you were that age? What do you think of Ren's treatment of Bernice?
2. What survival skills do the novel's female characters possess? Do they find security or vulnerability at Scales and Tales, the AnooYoo Spa, and within the community of Gardeners? What strength does Pilar find in nature, while Lucerne is drawn to artificial beauty?
3. How do Adam One's motivations compare to Zeb's? In their world, what advantages do men have? Are they really “advantages”?
4. Discuss Toby's parents and their fate. What does their story illustrate about the dangers of an unregulated and corrupt drug industry? What motivates Toby to become a healer?
5. How does Adam One's explanation of creation and the fall of humanity compare to more standard Judeo-Christian ideas? What does he offer his followers, beyond an understanding of the planet and the creatures that inhabit it?
6. Discuss the father figures in Ren's life: her stepfather, Zeb; her biological father, Frank; and eventually Mordis. What did they teach her about being a woman? How did they shape her expectations of Jimmy?
7. As a refugee from Texas, Amanda is an outsider, facing constant risk. Would you have harbored her? Why is Ren so impressed by her?
8. What is the result of a penal system like Painball? How does it influence the citizens' attitude toward crime?
9. Should Toby have honored Pilar's deathbed wish that she become an Eve? How did the lessons in beekeeping serve Toby in other ways as well?
10. Crake's BlyssPlus pill offers many false promises. What are they, and what was Crake really striving for (chapter 73)? If human beings are the greatest problem for the natural world, could they also provide solutions less drastic than Crake's? How?
11. In what ways do the novel's three voices—Toby's, Ren's, and Adam One's—complement one another? What unique perspective is offered in each narration?
12. Explore the lyrics from The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook. What do they say about the Gardener theology and the nature of their faith? Adam One does not always tell the truth to his congregation. Is well-meant lying ever acceptable?
13. Margaret Atwood's fiction often displays “gallows humor.” Can a thing be dire and funny at the same time? Must we laugh or die?
14. The Year of the Flood covers the same time period as Oryx and Crake, and contains a number of the same characters — (“Snowman,” a student at the Martha Graham Academy and “the last man on earth”) and Glenn (“Crake,” who studied at the Watson-Crick Institute), as well as Bernice, Jimmy's hostile college room-mate, Amanda, a live-in artist girlfriend, Ren (“Brenda,”) whom he remembers briefly in Oryx and Crake as a high-school fling, Jimmy's mother, who runs away to become an activist, and the God's Gardeners, whom he mentions as a fringe green cult. Re-read the final pages of both books. What do you predict for the remaining characters? Should the Gardeners execute the Painballers? Why? Why not? Would you?
15. What parallels did you see between The Year of the Flood and current headlines?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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I Still Dream About You
Fannie Flagg, 2010
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400065936
Summary
The beloved Fannie Flagg is back and at her irresistible and hilarious best in I Still Dream About You, a comic mystery romp through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, past, present, and future.
Meet Maggie Fortenberry, a still beautiful former Miss Alabama. To others, Maggie’s life seems practically perfect—she’s lovely, charming, and a successful real estate agent at Red Mountain Realty. Still, Maggie can’t help but wonder how she wound up in her present condition. She had been on her hopeful way to becoming Miss America and realizing her childhood dream of someday living in one of the elegant old homes on top of Red Mountain, with the adoring husband and the 2.5 children, but then something unexpected happened and changed everything.
Maggie graduated at the top of her class at charm school, can fold a napkin in more than forty-eight different ways, and can enter and exit a car gracefully, but all the finesse in the world cannot help her now. Since the legendary real estate dynamo Hazel Whisenknott, beloved founder of Red Mountain Realty, died five years ago, business has gone from bad to worse—and the future isn’t looking much better. But just when things seem completely hopeless, Maggie suddenly comes up with the perfect plan to solve it all.
As Maggie prepares to put her plan into action, we meet the cast of high-spirited characters around her. To Brenda Peoples, Maggie’s best friend and real estate partner, Maggie’s life seems easy as pie. Slender Maggie doesn’t have to worry about her figure, or about her Weight Watchers sponsor catching her at the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop. And Ethel Clipp, Red Mountain’s ancient and grumpy office manager with the bright purple hair, thinks the world of Maggie but has absolutely nothing nice to say about their rival Babs “The Beast of Birmingham” Bingington, the unscrupulous estate agent who hates Maggie and is determined to put her out of business.
Maggie has heartbreaking secrets in her past, but through a strange turn of events, she soon discovers, quite by accident, that everybody, it seems—dead or alive—has at least one little secret.
I Still Dream About You is a wonderful novel that is equal parts Southern charm, murder mystery, and that perfect combination of comedy and old-fashioned wisdom that can be served up only by America’s own remarkable Fannie Flagg. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Real Name—Patricia Neal
• Birth—September 21, 1944
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—University of Alabama
• Currently—lives in Montecito, California
Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was produced by Universal Pictures as Fried Green Tomatoes), Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow, and A Redbird Christmas. Flagg’s script for Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for both the Academy and Writers Guild of America awards and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. Flagg lives in California and in Alabama.
Before her career as a novelist, Flagg was known principally for her on-screen television and film work. She was second banana to Allen Funt on the long-running Candid Camera, perhaps the trailblazer for the current crop of so-called reality television. (Her favorite segment, she told Entertainment Weekly in 1992, was driving a car through the wall of a drive-thru bank.) She appeared as the school nurse in the 1978 film version of Grease, and on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And she was a staple of the Match Game television game shows in the '70s.
Quite early on in her writing career, Fannie Flagg stumbled onto the holy grail of secrets in the publishing world: what editors are actually good for.
Attending the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference in 1978 to see her idol, Eudora Welty, Flagg won first prize in the writing contest for a short story told from the perspective of a 11-year-old girl, spelling mistakes and all—a literary device that she figured was ingenious because it disguised her own pitiful spelling, later determined to be an outgrowth of dyslexia. But when a Harper & Row editor approached her about expanding the story into a full-length novel, she realized the jig was up. In 1994 she told the New York Times:
I just burst into tears and said, "I can't write a novel. I can't spell. I can't diagram a sentence." He took my hand and said the most wonderful thing I've ever heard. He said, "Oh, honey, what do you think editors are for?"
Writing
And so Fannie Flagg—television personality, Broadway star, film actress and six-time Miss Alabama contestant—became a novelist, delving into the Southern-fried, small-town fiction of the sort populated by colorful characters with homespun, no-nonsense observations. Characters that are known to say things like, "That catfish was so big the photograph alone weighed 40 pounds."
Her first novel, an expanded take on that prize-winning short story, was Coming Attractions: A Wonderful Novel, the story of a spunky yet hapless girl growing up in the South, helping her alcoholic father run the local bijou. But it was with her second novel where it all came together. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—a novel, for all its light humor, that infuses its story with serious threads on racism, feminism, spousal abuse and hints at Sapphic love -- follows two pairs of women: a couple running a hometown café in the Depression-era South and an elderly nursing home resident in the late 1980s who strikes up an impromptu friendship with a middle-aged housewife unhappy with her life.
The result was not only a smash novel, but a hit movie as well, one that garnered Flagg an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay. She won praise from the likes of Erma Bombeck, Harper Lee and idol Eudora Welty, and the Los Angeles Times critic compared it to The Last Picture Show. The New York Times called it, simply, "a real novel and a good one."
As a writer, though, this Birmingham, Alabama native found her voice as a chronicler of Southern Americana and life in its self-contained hamlets. "Fannie Flagg is the most shamelessly sentimental writer in America," The Christian Science Monitor wrote in a 1998 review of her third novel. "She's also the most entertaining. You'd have to be a stone to read Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! without laughing and crying. The cliches in this novel are deep-fat fried: not particularly nutritious, but entirely delicious."
The New York Times, also reviewing Baby Girl, took note of the spinning-yarns-on-the-front-porch quality to her work: "Even when she prattles—and she prattles a great deal during this book—you are always aware that a star is at work. She has that gift that certain people from the theater have, of never boring the audience. She keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along—and, most of all, she keeps it beloved."
But, lest she be pegged as simply a champion of the good ol’ days, it's worth noting that her writing can be something of a clarion call for social change. In Fried Green Tomatoes, Flagg comments not only on the racial divisions of the South but also on the minimization of women in both the 1930s and contemporary life. Just as Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison commit to a life together—without menfolk—in the Depression-era days of Whistle Stop, Alabama, middle-aged Evelyn Couch in modern-day Birmingham discovers the joys of working outside the home and defining her life outside meeting the every whim of her husband.
On top of her writing, Flagg has also stumped for the Equal Rights Amendment.
I think it's time that women have to stand up and say we do not want to be seen in a demeaning manner," Flagg told a Premiere magazine reporter in an interview about the film adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes.
Extras
• Flagg approximated the length of her first novel by weight. Her editor told her a novel should be around 400 pages. "So I weighed 400 pages and it came to two pounds and something," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987." I wrote until I had two pounds and something, and, as it happened, the novel was just about done."
• She landed the Candid Camera gig while a writer at a New York comedy club. When one of the performers couldn't go on, Flagg acted as understudy, and the show's host, Allen Funt, was in the audience.
• Flagg went undiagnosed for years as a dyslexic until a viewer casually mentioned it to her in a fan letter. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
For a comic mystery romp, Fannie Flagg's latest book, I Still Dream About You, has a lot of talk about suicide, incest, cross-dressing and vicious backstabbing. But hey, who says those are bad things? Flagg, the author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe and a half-dozen other popular books, has filled this charming new novel with quirky characters, led by a former Miss Alabama.
Sarah Pekkanen - Washington Post
Flagg's whimsical heartstring tugger (after Can't Wait to Get to Heaven) follows the continually interrupted suicide attempt of a former Birmingham, Ala., beauty queen, now 60 and a realtor. The 2008 election is hitting the home stretch as former Miss Alabama, Maggie Fortenberry, plans her exit from a world she can no longer bear. Still grieving over the loss of her best friend and unceasingly optimistic boss, Hazel Whizenknott, Maggie feels like a failure: the business is in decline, and she's lamenting a lifetime's worth of chances missed, including turning down her one true love. In fact, she's come up with 16 "perfectly good reasons to jump in the river" and only two reasons not to. Of course, there is hope to be found—professionally, personally, perhaps romantically—even in Maggie's darkest hours. Flagg gives the story some breadth with a subplot about a friend's campaign to become Birmingham's first black mayor. Maggie's quandary, meanwhile, is detailed with Flagg's trademark light touch and a sincere wit that's heavier on heart than sass.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Maggie’s life hasn’t turned out the way she’d hoped, and at the beginning of the book she makes her big decision to fix it once and for all. Why do you think she feels this way, and what makes her decide that the time has come to put her plan into action? Have you ever felt the way Maggie does, and if so, what did you do to solve it?
2. Maggie’s decision comes at the end of a perfectly ordinary day, with no bells and whistles or dramatic events. In your opinion, is this typical of the way big changes happen in real life? Can you think of examples in your own life where a major event happened on an otherwise ordinary-feeling day?
3. What are Maggie’s “16 perfectly good reasons to jump in the river”? If you were making the list, what would you put in your “pros” and “cons” columns?
4. When Charles proposed to Maggie years before, she turned him down. Why did she do this? Do you think she made the right decision, given the circumstances at the time? In hindsight, should she have made a different decision? What would you have done?
5. Both Brenda and Maggie each think that the other’s life is easier and happier. Brenda is envious of Maggie’s good looks and constant cheerfulness and charm, while Maggie wishes she had Brenda’s practicality and the comfort of her big family. Why do you think they believe this—is the grass simply always greener on the other side of the fence? If you had to choose between Brenda’s and Maggie’s, which kind of life would you prefer?
6. Edwina Crocker-Sperry spent her life protecting a huge secret, one that both gave her tremendous freedom and tightly curtailed her world. What do you think that life was like for her? Would you like to have been Edwina, or to have lived a life like hers? What do you think would have happened if her secret had been discovered?
7. Everyone who meets Hazel Whisenknott falls in love with her, with her energy and enthusiasm and optimism. Even five years after she is gone, she still brightens the lives of all her friends and employees. Do you know anyone like Hazel?
8. Hazel refused to let anything get in the way of her dreams. What lessons could we all learn from Hazel’s story? What about Maggie’s?
9. At one point, Maggie meets a schoolmate who is surprised to hear that Maggie never became Miss America—the friend has been bragging about knowing Miss America for years. When Maggie tells her she was just the second runner-up, she laughs, “Honey, it’s like the Oscars; after so many years, nobody ever remembers who won, just who was nominated.” How does this change Maggie’s perspective? Do you think the observation is true, or not? Can you think of examples?
10. One effect of Maggie’s decision, she realizes, is that she no longer has to worry about the consequences of her actions. She stops going to the gym and watching the news, and starts having a lot more fun. She even speaks her mind to Babs Bingington! If you didn’t have to worry about the long-term consequences of your actions, what would you do differently? Is there anything on your list you might want to do anyway? Is there anything you might want to give up, despite the consequences?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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