Oxygen
Carol Cassella, 2008
Simon & Schuster
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416556114
Summary
With the compassion of Jodi Picoult and the medical realism of Atul Gawande, Oxygen is a riveting new novel by a real-life anesthesiologist, an intimate story of relationships and family that collides with a high-stakes medical drama.
Dr. Marie Heaton is an anesthesiologist at the height of her profession. She has worked, lived and breathed her career since medical school, and she now practices at a top Seattle hospital. Marie has carefully constructed and constricted her life according to empirical truths, to the science and art of medicine.
But when her tried-and-true formula suddenly deserts her during a routine surgery, she must explain the nightmarish operating room disaster and face the resulting malpractice suit. Marie's best friend, colleague and former lover, Dr. Joe Hillary, becomes her closest confidante as she twists through depositions, accusations and a remorseful preoccupation with the mother of the patient in question. As she struggles to salvage her career and reputation, Marie must face hard truths about the path she's chosen, the bridges she's burned and the colleagues and superiors she's mistaken for friends.
A quieter crisis is simultaneously unfolding within Marie's family. Her aging father is losing his sight and approaching an awkward dependency on Marie and her sister, Lori. But Lori has taken a more traditional path than Marie and is busy raising a family.
Although Marie has been estranged from her Texas roots for decades, the ultimate responsibility for their father's care is falling on her. As her carefully structured life begins to collapse, Marie confronts questions of love and betrayal, family bonds and the price of her own choices.
Set against the natural splendor of Seattle, and inside the closed vaults of hospital operating rooms, Oxygen climaxes in a final twist that is as heartrending as it is redeeming. From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1956-57
• Raised—Dallas, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Duke University; M.D.,Baylor College of Medicine
• Currently—lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington
Carol Cassella is a practicing anesthesiologist and novelist. She was a closet writer for years before blending medicine and fiction in her first novel, Oxygen, the story of an anesthesiologist tangled in the aftermath of an operating room catastrophe. Oxygen was an Indie Best Pick for July 2008, and selected as one of the best first novels of 2008 by The Library Journal. The novel has become a national bestseller and was released as a trade paperback in June, 2009.
Carol grew up in Dallas, Texas and graduated from Duke University with a degree in English Literature. After working in publishing for several years, Carol decided to pursue her fascination with all the weird and wonderful ways humans behave and misbehave by studying medicine. She initially intended to become a psychiatrist, but when she couldn’t separate the body and the soul she veered into internal medicine and then, six years later, into anesthesiology. She is board certified in both internal medicine and anesthesiology. Prior to writing fiction, Carol wrote about global public health issues in the developing world for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Carol now lives on Bainbridge Island, WA with her husband Steve and their two sets of twins. She enjoys hiking and cross country skiing in the North Cascades. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A subtle, compelling plot that twists and twists again. This quickly becomes a book you cannot put down.
Dallas Morning News
A finely crafted mystery, as well as a sparkling literary work.
Denver Post
A startling plot twist, combined with Cassella's first-hand understanding of our ailing healthcare system, makes this involving debut just what the doctor ordered.
People
Powered by Cassella's 25 years in the medical field, this nicely wrought debut follows the travails of an experienced Seattle anesthesiologist after an eight-year-old patient dies while under the knife. In the aftermath, Dr. Marie Heaton is entangled in both her grief and a malpractice lawsuit. As the many meetings with attorneys blur together and autopsy results are awaited, Marie, who regrets having missed out on the "intended stream of marriage and motherhood," mediates the domestic squabbles in her sister's family; leans on and gets leaned on by colleague and ex-lover-turned-best friend, Joe Hillary; and tries to come to a détente with her widowed father, who is losing his vision and with it his autonomy. As Marie is increasingly scrutinized, a few unexpected twists slyly work themselves into the investigation of the death, and the ice between Marie and her father slowly thaws. The prose is competent and the plot moves at a brisk pace, but the real hook is Cassella's knowing portrayal of the health industrial complex's inner workings; she knows the turf and doesn't spare readers the nasty bits.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. After Jolene's death, Marie thinks almost as much about Bobbie as she does about her own experience. Why is it so important for her to see Bobbie? What does she hope to accomplish?
2. Marie says that no death she has witnessed affects her as Jolene's does, yet one experience was different: the death of her mother. How do you think learning of her mother's condition and attempting to help her parents understand it while she was in medical school affects Marie as a doctor? How was the time of her mother's death a turning point between the life she was raised for and the life she chose?
3. When Marie learns that the Turner Syndrome revealed in Jolene's autopsy could make losing the case and therefore her career more likely, she wonders "if all the money and possessions were stripped away, what, exactly, would be left?" What choices does the case force Marie to reconsider? What doubts does she have about her life and career?
4. Discuss the relationship between Marie and her sister, Lori. Why doesn't Marie tell Lori about what happened to Jolene immediately? What conflicting emotions does Marie have about Lori's life and marriage?
5. When Marie and Joe are in the hotel in Texas, he describes his theory of the "Big O," a theory that could apply to several characters in the book, perhaps Joe most of all. Why is it significant that Joe be the one to hold this hopeful belief? In what ways are each of the characters "cloaked"?
6. Marie's father is literally going blind, and yet each of them is blind in a way, unable to see through their estrangement and past wrongs. What does Marie learn about how her father "sees" her during her visit? What does she "see" in him? What is the significance of the gift of her mother's ring?
7. The balance between vulnerability and control functions on several levels in the novel: Between doctors and patients in the operating room, during the legal battle in the aftermath of Jolene's death, and in Marie's relationships with her father and Joe. What happens when the balance shifts in each situation? What does Marie learn about control within each context, or from each person?
8. Joe is one of the most surprising characters in the book. He buoys Marie up, he gives her strength, but in the end he is revealed as the weak one. Were Joe's feelings for Marie genuine? Does his letter change your opinion of him? Ultimately, how does Marie feel about him?
9. Betrayal is an important theme in the book. Marie is betrayed by Joe and the hospital. Bobbie and Jolene are betrayed by them too. Marie's father believes she betrayed him and his faith when she was a teenager. What other betrayals can you think of? What motivation is at the root of each betrayal?
10. Consider the depictions of hospitals and doctors on television versus in Oxygen. How does the novel's authentic portrayal of medical culture, its routines and its dilemmas, differ from what you see elsewhere?
11. The ending of the novel is particularly bittersweet. Marie's innocence is intact, but Joe's innocence, and her relationship with him, are undone. Were you surprised? Were you satisfied with this resolution?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Operation Shylock
Philip Roth, 1993
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679750291
Summary
In this fiendishly imaginative book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator.
With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare (From the publishers.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 19, 1933
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bucknell University; M.A., University of
Chicago
• Awards—the most awarded US author—see below
• Currently—lives in Connecticut
After many years of teaching comparative literature—mostly at the University of Pennsylvania—Philip Roth retired from teaching as Distinguished Professor of Literature at Hunter College in 1992. Until 1989, he was general editor of the Penguin book series Writers from the Other Europe, which he inaugurated in 1974 and which introduced the work of Bruno Schultz and Milan Kundera to an American audience.
His lengthy interviews with foreign authors—among them Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, and Aharon Appelfeld—have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933 and has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York. He now resides in Connecticut. (From the publisher.)
More
Philip Roth's long and celebrated career has been something of a thorn in the side of the writer. As it is for so many, fame has been the proverbial double-edged sword, bringing his trenchant tragic-comedies to a wide audience, but also making him a prisoner of expectations and perceptions. Still, since 1959, Roth has forged along, crafting gorgeous variations of the Great American Novel and producing, in addition, an autobiography (The Facts) and a non-fictional account of his father's death (Patrimony: A True Story).
Roth's novels have been oft characterized as "Jewish literature," a stifling distinction that irks Roth to no end. Having grown up in a Jewish household in a lower-middle-class sub-section of Newark, New Jersey, he is incessantly being asked where his seemingly autobiographical characters end and the author begins, another irritant for Roth. He approaches interviewers with an unsettling combination of stoicism, defensiveness, and black wit, qualities that are reflected in his work. For such a high-profile writer, Roth remains enigmatic, seeming to have laid his life out plainly in his writing, but refusing to specify who the real Philip Roth is.
Roth's debut Goodbye, Columbus instantly established him as a significant writer. This National Book Award winner was a curious compendium of a novella that explored class conflict and romantic relationships and five short stories. Here, fully formed in Roth's first outing, was his signature wit, his unflinching insightfulness, and his uncanny ability to satirize his character's situations while also presenting them with humanity. The only missing element of his early work was the outrageousness he would not begin to cultivate until his third full-length novel Portnoy's Complaint—an unquestionably daring and funny post-sexual revolution comedy that tipped Roth over the line from critically acclaimed writer to literary celebrity.
Even as Roth's personal relationships and his relationship to writing were severely shaken following the success of Portnoy's Complaint, he continued publishing outrageous novels in the vein of his commercial breakthrough. There was Our Gang, a parodic attack on the Nixon administration, and The Breast, a truly bizarre take on Kafka's Metamorphosis, and My Life as a Man, the pivotal novel that introduced Roth's literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.
Zuckerman would soon be the subject of his very own series, which followed the writer's journey from aspiring young artist with lofty goals to a bestselling author, constantly bombarded by idiotic questions, to a man whose most important relationships have all but crumbled in the wake of his success. The Zuckerman Trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Counterlife) directly parallels Roth's career and unfolds with aching poignancy and unforgiving humor.
Zuckerman would later reemerge in another trilogy, although this time he would largely be relegated to the role of narrator. Roth's American Trilogy (I Married a Communist, the PEN/Faulkner Award winning The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America), shifts the focus to key moments in the history of late-20th–century American history.
In Everyman (2006), Roth reaches further back into history. Taking its name from a line of 15th-century English allegorical plays, Everyman is classic Roth—funny, tragic, and above all else, human. It is also yet another in a seemingly unbreakable line of critical favorites, praised by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Library Journal.
In 2007's highly anticipated Exit Ghost, Roth returned Nathan Zuckerman to his native Manhattan for one final adventure, thus bringing to a rueful, satisfying conclusion one of the most acclaimed literary series of our day. While this may (or may not) be Zuckerman's swan song, it seems unlikely that we have seen the last Philip Roth. Long may he roar. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Literary Awards
Philip Roth is one of the most celebrated living American writers. Two of his works of fiction have won the National Book Award (Goodbye, Columbus; Sabbath's Theater); two others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards (Patrimony; Counterlife); again, another two were finalists. He has also won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. In 2001, The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. In May 2006, he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award — both for lifetime achievement.
The May 21, 2006 issue of the New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Of the 22 books cited, six of Roth's novels were selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O. Scott, stated, "If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won." ("More" and "Awards" from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It quickly becomes clear that Operation Shylock is less a conventional novel than a playful monograph on the process of writing fiction, less a philosophical thriller than a comprehensive encyclopedia of Mr. Roth's favorite literary themes and preoccupations. As he has done so often in the past, Mr. Roth gives us clever disquisitions on the boundaries between reality and fiction; once again, he holds his own literary oeuvre up to the light, using it as a prism to examine questions of identity, Jewishness and the unreckoned consequences of art....Mr. Roth ... allows all his characters to talk (and talk and talk and talk) about their lives, their obsessions, their theories and their psyches. Although much of this talk is brilliantly rendered—by turns funny, outrageous, ironic and entertaining—it throws the book off balance, undermining its ingenious but fragile plot.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
One of Roth's grand inventions.... [He is] a comic genius...a living master.
Harold Bloom - New York Review of Books
The uncontested master of comic irony.
Time (Best American Novel, 1993.)
Roth's brilliant, absurdist novel, set in Jerusalem during the trial of John Demjanjuk, follows the intersecting paths of two characters who share Roth's name and impersonate one another with dizzying speed.
Publishers Weekly
The drama of Jewish survival takes a new twist in this novel, but Rothean ideas persist: all humans make fiction, man betrays and fulfills his father's dream; an artist's doubt is his integrity; Jews test freedom (in the West from exclusion and prejudice, in Israel from temptations of power); embattled Israel dramatizes the nationalisms that drive history, with the Holocaust their persistent threat. Here, through a pseudo-autobiographical escapade in intifada Israel during the "Ivan the Terrible" trial, a writer confronts his double. Playing off recent autobiography, Roth gives his fictive protagonist, "Philip Roth," the author's known career. Led into Mossad intrigue to defend Jewish security and his writer's integrity, this "Roth" chews the cud of these tortuous themes and is at times as baffled as Kafka's K. Using "Philip Roth" as an irritant to thought, Roth will make some readers steam. By midway he is telegraphing his punches, and his sparkling absurdity dissolves in perseveration. Roth reported in the New York Times, March 9, 1993, that all events depicted in this book are in fact true but that the Mossad insisted that he bill it as fiction. Recommended for public libraries.—Ed., Alan Cooper, York Coll., CUNY
Library Journal
Roth has worked out so frequently and acrobatically with fictional versions of himself that his entanglement here with a doppelganger insisting that he's Philip Roth—a double whose visionary "diasporism" gets the hapless narrator tied up in plots engineered by the Mossad, the PLO, and God knows who else—is as logical as it is frenetically funny. Arriving in Jerusalem just after a hallucinatory withdrawal from Halcion, Roth is comically vulnerable to the double who's using his striking resemblance to the novelist to curry favor and raise money for his reverse-Zionist project: to return all Ashkenazic Jews from Israel, where fundamentalist Muslims threaten them with extinction, to the relatively benign cities of Europe. When Roth threatens legal action against the double, whom he christens Moishe Pipik, Pipik sends opulent, dyslexic Chicago oncology nurse Wanda Jane "Jinx" Possesski, a charter member of Pipik's Anti-Semites Anonymous, to intercede for him. Roth, falling in lust with this latest shiksa, finds himself slipping into Pipik's identity, spouting off diasporist speeches, and unwittingly accepting a million-dollar check for the diasporist cause from crippled philanthropist Louis B. Smilesburger. A zany ride back to Jerusalem from Ramallah, where he's incidentally delivered a loony, impassioned anti-Zionist tirade, ends with Roth rescued by a young lieutenant seeking a letter of recommendation to NYU, and the check lost or stolen. As he takes in the Israeli trial of John Demjanjuk, Roth ponders Pipik's insistence that "I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS" and, under challenge from every side, questions his notorious Jewish self-hatred. Still ahead: antiquarian David Supposnik's request that Roth write an introduction to Leon Klinghoffer's recently discovered travel diaries, Roth's kidnapping, and his agreeing to undertake a secret mission in Athens for the Mossad. A deliberately anticlimactic epilogue substitutes for the final chapter that would have described the secret mission. No matter: rarely have fact and fiction, personal confession and wild imaginings, led such a deeply, unnervingly comic dance.
Kirkus Reviews
Book Club Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
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Someone Knows My Name (The Book of Negroes)
Lawrence Hill, 2007
W.W. Norton & Co.
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393333091
Summary
Kidnapped as a child from Africa, Aminata Diallo is enslaved in South Carolina but escapes during the chaos of the Revolutionary War. In Manhattan she becomes a scribe for the British, recording the names of blacks who have served the King and earned freedom in Nova Scotia.
But the hardship and prejudice there prompt her to follow her heart back to Africa, then on to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and its toll on her life and a whole people. It is a story that no listener, and no reader, will ever forget. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A., Laval University (Quebec); M.A., Johns
Hopkins University (USA)
• Awards—Rogers Writers' Trust Prize; Commonwealth
Writers' Prize (both Canadian).
• Currently—lives in Burlington, Ontario, Canada
Lawrence Hill is the author of the novels, Someone Knows My Name (published as The Book of Negroes in Cabada), Any Known Blood and Some Great Thing and of the nonfiction work The Deserter's Tale (with Joshua Key). He lives in Ontario, Canada. (From the publisher.)
More
Lawrence Hill is an award-winning Canadian novelist and memoirist. He is best known for the 2001 memoir Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada and the 2007 novel Someone Knows My Name (The Book of Negroes in Canada).
Hill, the son of social scientist and public servant Daniel G. Hill and social activist Donna Hill and the brother of singer-songwriter Dan Hill, grew up in the Don Mills neighbourhood of Toronto. He currently lives in Burlington, Ontario, with his wife and five children.
In 2007, Hill collaborated with former US-Army Soldier (now deserter) Joshua Key to write Key's account of the Iraq War. His book The Deserter's Tale, the story of an ordinary soldier who walked away from the war in Iraq is the result of their interviews and meetings.
Someone Knows / Book of Negroes was longlisted for the Giller Prize and won the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the 2009 edition of Canada Reads.
Hill also won the 2005 National Magazine Award for best essay for his work entitled "Is Africa's Pain Black America's Burden?", published in The Walrus. He also wrote the screenplay for Seeking Salvation, a documentary film about the Black church in Canada. Seeking Salvation won the American Wilbur Award for best national television documentary in 2005. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In Lawrence Hill’s wonderfully written fictional slave narrative, the protagonist exhibits similar “proof on my flesh” of slavery’s barbarity.... In Someone Knows My Name, as in the slave narratives that inspired it, language is power. The slave owner marks the bodies of those he owns, but when the enslaved take possession of words, spoken and—especially—written, they move toward freedom. The young Frederick Douglass’s master knew this, admonishing his wife that if she taught Douglass how to read, “there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.”
Nancy Kline - New York times Book Review
Lawrence Hill's historical intelligence was already manifest in his 1997 novel, Any Known Blood, in which he used racial and geographic borders to explore and transform a Canadian story. In his new novel, Someone Knows My Name, Hill has extended his range and refined his craft to produce a compelling narrative that moves from mid-18th-century West Africa to South Carolina, Manhattan, Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone and London…Hill's hugely impressive historical work is completely engrossing and deserves a wide, international readership.
Delia Jarrett-Macauley - Washington Post
Stunning, wrenching and inspiring, the fourth novel by Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) spans the life of Aminata Diallo, born in Bayo, West Africa, in 1745. The novel opens in 1802, as Aminata is wooed in London to the cause of British abolitionists, and begins reflecting on her life. Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white. Hill handles the pacing and tension masterfully, particularly during the beginnings of the American revolution, when the British promise to free Blacks who fight for the British: Aminata's related, eventful travels to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone follow. In depicting a woman who survives history's most trying conditions through force of intelligence and personality, Hill's book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force.
Publishers Weekly
Around 1745, young Aminata Diallo is abducted from her West African home and sold into slavery in South Carolina. An observant and highly intelligent child, she quickly learns not only how to speak English but also how to read and write. On a trip to New York City with her master, Aminata escapes during chaotic anti-British demonstrations. She helps the embattled British compile "The Book of Negroes," a list of thousands of black Loyalists, and these slaves are transported to Nova Scotia and granted their freedom. Later some of them are sent to Sierra Leone as part of an abolitionist social experiment, and Aminata finally realizes her long-held dream of returning home. By setting the book early in the Revolutionary period, Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) finds something new in the familiar slave narrative. Unfortunately, his didactic purpose gets the upper hand and overwhelms the story. Aminata is simply too noble to be believable, and other major characters are mainly symbolic. Nevertheless, Hill's fascinating source material makes this a good choice for book clubs and discussion groups.
Edward St. John - Library Journal
(Adult/High School.) During the 18th century, Aminata Diallo is kidnapped from her village, survives the ocean voyage on a slave ship, is purchased by an indigo producer from South Carolina, and gets caught in the Revolutionary War. Later, she is traded to a Jewish duty inspector. She marries Chekura, a boy from a neighboring village, and gives birth to two children. Aminata's trials continue as she and her husband take part in Britain's promise of freedom for Loyalists by traveling to Nova Scotia, where she continues to long to return to Africa, but ends up in London instead. Throughout the story, her major assets are her ability to read and write and to serve as a midwife, which help in her quest for freedom. With mature themes (e.g., a rape scene on the ship, descriptive killings, and sexual situations), this book is suited for older teens. Hill clearly researched multiple people and sources to provide an accurate account of Aminata's heroic journey and brings to life crucial world history. Teens who enjoyed Sharon Draper's Copper Sun (2006) will appreciate this page-turning novel. —Gregory Lum, Jesuit High School, Portland, OR
School Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Introduction: Years before I began writing Someone Knows My Name, I came across two startling discoveries in a scholarly work. I read that thousands of African Americans fled slavery to serve the British, who promised to liberate them in return for service during the American Revolution. When the British lost the war, they sent those African Americans who could show that they had served the British for at least one year to Canada. Three thousand names were entered into a 150-page military ledger known as the "Book of Negroes," and, in the last half of 1783, the former slaves set sail to Nova Scotia.
Ten years later, many of these same former slaves were so disgruntled with the hardships they encountered in Canada—slavery, indentured servitude, anti-black race riots, and segregation—that in 1792 they accepted an offer from the British government and sailed to Africa in a flotilla of fifteen ships, to form the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone. This was the first back-to-Africa exodus in the history of the Americas, and it turns out that a number of the adults swept up in this migration had actually been born in Africa.
As I began to write Someone Knows My Name, I imagined the life of an old woman on one of those vessels carrying liberated African Americans from Halifax to Freetown. What would she look like? Where had she been born in Africa? How had she been stolen into slavery, where had she lived in South Carolina, and how on earth did she find herself, in late life, sailing back to Africa from Canada? Someone Knows My Name is my attempt to give this fascinating but little-known story a human face. I gave the protagonist, Aminata Diallo, my eldest daughter's middle name. It is the story of a heroic woman in the eighteenth century, and I felt that the best way to lift her off the page was to love her like I love my own daughter. And indeed I loved Aminata from the moment I first started imagining her face, hearing her voice, seeing the way she walked with a platter balanced on her head.
My daughter, Genevieve Aminata Hill, was eleven years old when I started to write this story. The same age as my character when she is kidnapped by slave traders. What if this had happened to my own child? Aminata, the character, grew up under my tutelage. She learned to walk and then to read and to navigate her way in the world, and now this fictional creation of mine is all grown up and gone from the house. She belongs to the world of readers now, and I hope she will be well loved.
1. What is the significance of the title Someone Knows My Name?
2. What is your opinion about Hill's suggestion that Aminata's very youthfulness at the time of her abduction enables her emotional survival, even as some of the adults in her world show signs of crumbling?
3. The section of the book set in the sea islands of South Carolina depicts eighteenth-century indigo plantations where African American slaves and overseers are left largely to their own devices during the "sick season"—a good half of the year. To what degree does this cultural and social isolation allow for an interesting development and interaction of African American characters in the novel?
4. Aminata suffers some horrifying cruelties at the hands of her captors, but her relationships with her masters aren't always what you'd expect. How does Aminata's story reveal the complex ways that people react to unnatural, unequal relationships?
5. During the course of the story, Aminata marries and has a family. Although she is separated from them, she is reunited from time to time with her husband and one of her children. What does the work tell us about the nature of love and loyalty?
6. Aminata struggles to learn and master all sorts of systems of communicating in the new world: black English, white English, and Gullah, as well as understanding the uses of European money and maps. How do her various coping mechanisms shed light on her character?
7. Aminata longs for her home. What is the meaning of home in the novel, and how does the meaning change as the novel progresses?
8. What does the novel tell us about survival? Which characters fare best and why?
9. As Aminata moves from slavery to freedom, she finds that freedom is sometimes an empty promise. At what points in the novel did you feel this was true? Did it change how you thought about the meaning of freedom?
10. Aminata is a woman of extraordinary abilities—she is skillful with languages, literate, a speedy learner, a born negotiator. Why did Hill choose this story to be told by such a remarkable woman? What effect do her abilities have on the shaping of the story?
11. What do you think would be the challenges involved in writing a realistically painful novel that still offers enough light and hope to maintain the reader's interest and spirit?
12. What lessons does Aminata's tale hold for us in today's world?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Last Queen
C.W. Gortner, 2006
Random House
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345501851
Summary
One of history's most enigmatic women tells the haunting, passionate story of her tumultuous life. Juana of Castile is just thirteen when she witnesses the fall of Moorish Granada and uniting of the fractured kingdoms of Spain under her warrior parents, Isabel and Fernando.
Intelligent and beautiful, proud of her heritage, Juana rebels against her fate when she is chosen as a bride for the Hapsburg heir—until she arrives in Flanders and comes face-to-face with the prince known as Philip the Fair, a man who will bring her the greatest of passions, and the darkest despair. One by one, tragedy decimates Juana's family in Spain.
Suddenly, she finds herself heiress to Castile—a realm on the verge of chaos, prey to avaracious nobles and scheming lords bent on thwarting her rule. Juana vows to win her throne, until the betrayal of those she loves plunges her into a ruthless battle of wills—a struggle of corruption, perfidy, and heart-shattering deceit that could cost her the crown, her freedom, and her very life.
From the somber majesty of Renaissance Spain to the glittering courts of Flanders, France and Tudor England, Juana of Castile reveals her life and secrets in this captivating historical novel of romance, grandeur, power and treachery by the acclaimed author of The Secret Lion. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—southern Spain
• Education—M.F.A., (university unknown)
• Currently—lives in northern California, USA
Half-Spanish by birth, C.W. Gortner was raised in southern Spain, where he developed a lifelong fascination with history. After holding various jobs in the fashion industry, he earned a MFA in Writing with an emphasis in Renaissance Studies. He has taught university seminars on the 16th century and women in history, as well as workshops on writing, historical research, and marketing.
Acclaimed for his insight into his characters, he travels extensively to research his books. He has slept in a medieval Spanish castle, danced in a Tudor great hall, and explored library archives all over Europe.
His debut historical novel The Last Queen gained international praise and has been sold in ten countries to date. His new novel, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, his second, was published in 2010. He is currently at work on The Princess Isabella, his third historical novel, and The Tudor Secret, the first book in his new Tudor suspense series, The Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles.
C.W. lives with his partner in northern California. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
The 1492 conquest of Granada makes for high adventure and royal intrigue in this second sparkling historical from Gortner (The Secret Lion). Spanish Princess Juana, 13, watches as her parents, King Fernando and Queen Isabel, unite Spain, vanquish Moors and marry their children off to foreign kingdoms for favorable alliances: Princess Catalina becomes first wife to Henry VIII; Princess Juana, who narrates, is shipped off to marry Philip of Flanders, heir to the Hapsburg Empire. Although Juana balks at leaving Spain for the north and a husband she has never met, their instant chemistry soon turns to love. Years and children later, Juana unexpectedly becomes next in line to the Spanish crown and must carefully navigate every step of the journey from Flanders to Spain, fearful of alienating husband or parents or both. Emotional and political tensions soar as Juana's loyalties are tested to their limits. Disturbing royal secrets and court manipulations wickedly twist this enthralling story, brilliantly told.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. This novel is told from the point of view of a woman. Do you think the male author does a convincing job of immersing the reader in Juana’s thoughts and emotions?
2. The Last Queen is set mainly in sixteenth-century Spain. What did you learn about life in Spain during this time? How does the Spanish court differ from other courts you may have read about?
3. When Juana is told she must marry Philip, she begs to be released of her duty. How did you react to her mother, Queen Isabel, deciding to marry her off against her will? What do you think about Isabel’s notions of duty?
4. Princesses did not often get to choose whom they would marry, nor were they allowed to leave or divorce their spouses. How does this affect Juana in her struggles?
5. When Juana discovers her mother is dying, she realizes she cannot evade her destiny. Why do you think she decides to return to Flanders to fight for Castile? What are your impressions of her conflicts with her inheritance?
6. The differences in societal power between men and women in the sixteenth century are a principal theme in this novel. How do they compare to gender relations today?
7. Juana makes a terrible choice to free herself from Philip. Do you think her act was justified? How do you imagine you might have acted in her place?
8. History has dubbed Juana the Mad Queen. Do you believe she was mad? What are your impressions of her as a person and as a monarch?
9. Fernando of Aragon is an enigmatic personage in this novel. How do you feel about him and his actions?
10. Which of the characters in this novel were your favorites? Which did you dislike the most? Do you think the characters were portrayed as true to their time?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Innocent
Scott Turow, 2010
Grand Central Publishing
406 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446562423
Summary
The sequel to the genre-defining, landmark bestseller Presumed Innocent, Turow continues the story of Rusty Sabich and Tommy Molto who are, once again, twenty years later, pitted against each other in a riveting psychological match after the mysterious death of Rusty's wife. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 12, 1949
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Amherst; M.A. Stanford University; J.D.,
Harvard University
• Awards—Silver Dagger of British Crime Writers
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Scott F. Turow is an American author and practicing lawyer, who has written eight fiction and two nonfiction books. His works have been translated into over 20 languages and have sold over 25 million copies. Movies have been based on several of his books.
Turow was born in Chicago, attended New Trier High School, and graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He received an Edith Mirrielees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, where he attended from 1970 to 1972. In 1971, he married Annette Weisberg, a painter.
Scott Turow became a Jones Lecturer at Stanford until 1975, when he entered Harvard Law School. In 1977, Turow wrote One L, a book about his first year at law school.
After earning his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1978, Turow became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago, serving in that position until 1986. There he prosecuted several high-profile corruption cases, including the tax fraud case of state Attorney General William Scott. Turow also was lead counsel in Operation Greylord, the federal prosecution of Illinois judicial corruption cases.
Writing
After leaving the U.S. Attorney's office, Turow became a novelist, writing legal thrillers such as The Burden of Proof, Presumed Innocent, Pleading Guilty, and Personal Injuries, which Time magazine named as the Best Fiction Novel of 1999. All four became bestsellers, and Turow won multiple literary awards, most notably the Silver Dagger Award of the British Crime Writers.
Many of the characters appear in multiple books, and all of his novels take place in Kindle County. (The state is unspecified, but the county contains a tri-city conglomerate on the Mississippi between Chicago and New Orleans. —Burden of Proof p. 52.) In 1990, Turow was featured on the June 11 cover of Time, which described him as the "Bard of the Litigious Age." In 1995, Canadian author Derek Lundy published a biography of Turow, entitled Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy (ECW Press, 1995). Also, in the 1990s a British publisher bracketed Turow’s work with that of Margaret Atwood and John Irving, republishing it in the series Bloomsbury Modern Library.
Turow is the president of the Authors Guild. He was also President from 1997 to 1998 and has served on its board.
From 1997 to 1998 Turow was a member of the U.S. Senate Nominations Commission for the Northern District of Illinois, which recommends federal judicial appointments.
Current legal work
Turow is a partner of the Chicago law firm of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal. He works pro bono in most of his cases, including a 1995 case where he won the release of Alejandro Hernandez, who had spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He was also appointed to the commission considering the reform of the Illinois death penalty by former Governor George Ryan and is currently a member of the Illinois State Police Merit Board. He and his wife Annette divorced in late 2008 with three grown children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[Turow's] intimate understanding of his characters and his authoritative knowledge of the legal world inject the narrative with emotional fuel, creating suspense that has less to do with the actual twists and turns of the plot than with our interest in what will happen to these people and how they will behave under pressure…Rusty's second trial—which takes up the better half of this novel—proves to be just as suspenseful and gripping as his first.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
In Innocent, [Turow's] exploring the many ways in which, time after time, we fail to under stand ourselves, in which we miss or misinterpret the evidence that could tell us who we are. "If we are always a mystery to ourselves," Anna asks at the end of Sabich's latest ordeal, "then what is the chance of fully understanding anybody else?" That's a novelist's question as much as it is a lawyer's…Innocent is a meticulously constructed and superbly paced mystery…a lovely novel, gripping and darkly self-reflective.
Terrence Rafferty - New York Times Book Review
There are enough surprises...to keep the reader's attention fixed—Turow has always been very good at that—but as usual in his fiction there's more than skillful legal drama. Turow is a serious man who has thought long and carefully about the law. He understands that in the end it is not really much better than any other mechanism at uncovering absolute truth; that the courtroom is a roll of the dice…that life itself is a crapshoot…All of which makes for an intelligent, thoughtful novel: a grownup book for grownup readers.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post
Mesmerizing prose and intricate plotting lift Turow's superlative legal thriller, his best novel since his bestselling debut, Presumed Innocent, to which this is a sequel. In 2008, 22 years after the events of the earlier book, former lawyer Rusty Sabich, now a Kindle County, Ill., chief appellate judge, is again suspected of murdering a woman close to him. His wife, Barbara, has died in her bed of what appear to be natural causes, yet Rusty comes under scrutiny from his old nemesis, acting prosecuting attorney Tommy Molto, who unsuccessfully prosecuted him for killing his mistress decades earlier. Tommy's chief deputy, Jim Brand, is suspicious because Rusty chose to keep Barbara's death a secret, even from their son, Nat, for almost an entire day, which could have allowed traces of poison to disappear. Rusty's candidacy for a higher court in an imminent election; his recent clandestine affair with his attractive law clerk, Anna Vostic; and a breach of judicial ethics complicate matters further. Once again, Turow displays an uncanny ability for making the passions and contradictions of his main characters accessible and understandable.
Publishers Weekly
It took Turow more than 20 years to bring us the sequel to his best-selling first novel, Presumed Innocent, and it was worth the wait. Now 60 and long after being acquitted of murdering his mistress, Rusty Sabich has become chief judge of the Kindle County, IL, appellate court and is running for the state supreme court. When his wife dies in her sleep, Sabich waits 24 hours before calling his son or anyone else, setting off suspicions of foul play with his old nemesis, acting prosecutor Tommy Molto. The coroner determines she died of natural causes, but Molto and his chief deputy, Brand, quietly start building a case, convinced Sabich is trying to get away with murder again. Verdict: This is a beautifully written book with finely drawn characters and an intricate plot seamlessly weaving a troubled family story with a murder. Drawing the reader in and not letting go until the last page, Turow's legal thriller is a most worthy successor to Presumed Innocent and perhaps the author's finest work to date. —Stacy Alesi, Palm Beach Cty. Lib. Syst., Boca Raton, FL
Library Journal
Though at least one other lawyer turned author has subsequently achieved greater commercial success, Turow remains the master of the form, at least partly because he's more fascinated by the mysteries of the human heart than he is by the intricacies of the law. Here, suspense and discovery sustain the narrative momentum until the final pages, but character trumps plot in Innocent. The ironic title underscores the huge gap between innocence as a moral state of grace and "not guilty" as a courtroom verdict. Once again, Turow's novel pits Rusty Sabich against Tommy Molto, former colleagues turned adversaries, with the former now chief judge of the appellate court and the latter as prosecuting attorney. Sabich remains more complicated and morally compromised, while Molto is much more certain of right and wrong. Exonerated in a murder trial 20 years ago, but his innocence never completely established, Sabich finds himself once again under suspicion after the sudden death of his mentally unstable, heavily medicated wife. As in the first novel, Sabich suffers the guilt of infidelity, but does this make him guilty of the murder Molto becomes convinced the judge has committed? Complicating the issue are the judge's only son, more of a legal scholar than his father though with some of his mother's emotional instability, and the whirlwind romance between the junior Sabich and the former clerk for the senior Sabich. To reveal more would undermine the reader's own pleasure of discovery, but the judge, whether guilty or not, might prefer prison to the revelation of crucial secrets. "How do we ever know what's in someone else's heart or mind?" the novel asks. "If we are always a mystery to ourselves, then what is the chance of fully understanding anybody else?" The various perspectives—with some characters knowing more than the reader does, while the reader knows more than others—contribute to an exquisite tension that drives the narrative. Where the title of the first novel may have presumed innocence, the sequel knows that we're all guilty of something.
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 Innocent:
1. What is the significance of the book's title, ostensibly the legal term for someone found "not guilty"? In what way is it ironic, suggesting a philosophical, moral question?
2. Author Scott Turow uses an unusual structure for this novel, moving back and forth between time frames and viewpoints. Why might he have used this technique rather than a straightforward narrative? Did the novel's structure enhance or detract from your enjoyment?
3. Have you read Presumed Innocent, the "prequel" to this novel? If so, how do the two compare? Is it important to have read the previous book? Why or why not?
4. Follow-up to Question 3: If you haven't read Presumed Innocent, was it hard to come up to speed on this novel? Having finished Innocent—and looking back—would it have made a difference if you had read the first book? If so...in what way? Will you read PI now? Why or why not?
5. How would you describe Rusty Sabitch? What kind of a man is he? Has he learned from his past mistakes?
6. What is Rusty's wife Barbara like? Why have the two stayed married all these years?
7. Author Turow seems as interested in penetrating the mysteries of marriage and the human heart as he is the ins-and-outs of the legal system. What issues does he raise about how two people operate within a marriage? What do we come to learn about Barbara and Rusty's marriage? Do you see parallels to your own relationships?
8. What about Anna Vostic? First of all, will older men ever find age-appropriate women? Or is the answer to that "In your dreams, sweetheart"?
9. Back to Anna: what kind of person is she...and why does she end up in an affair with Rusty's son? Talk about those complications.
10. What about Nat? Is he a sympathetic character or not? Good boyfriend material...good son material?
11. What drives the prosecutorial team—Tommy Molto and Jim Brand? Why is Brand so eager to convict Rusty Sabitch? What evidence does the prosecution have against Rusty? Is it particularly strong?
12. Much of the book is a courtroom drama. Did you enjoy the pyrotechnics between prosecutors and defense attorneys?
13. How does Rusty's secret drive, or shape, his own defense?
14. Does this book deliver? Were you surprised by the various plot twists? Going back over the book, can you pick out where Turow purposely withholds information—then reveals it—to keep readers wondering?
15. What insights does this book offer—or issues does it raise—regarding the country's (or a state's) legal system ?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)