Sullivan's Island: A Low Country Tale
Dorothea Benton Frank, 2004
Penguin Group USA
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780515127225
Summary
Sullivan's Island is a real place, a barrier island seven miles off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. Home to Fort Moultrie, which is known for its role in the American Revolution and the Civil War, it is also called the "Ellis Island of Slavery" as over 200,000 slaves from the west coast of Africa entered our country on its shores between 1770 and 1775. As a young soldier, Edgar Allen Poe was stationed at Fort Moultrie and wrote The Gold Bug during that time. It is said the island is a haunted place, populated with the ghosts of broken hearts and lives of untold courage.
Dorothea Benton Frank's first novel, Sullivan's Island combines the stories of love and family with history and place. Set in 1963 and in 1999, it compares and contrasts coming of age in the tumultuous early sixties to coming of age in the peace of the early nineties. It introduces the Gullah Culture to many people for the first time and explains its significance in forming the traditions and values of the island children, which they carry into their adult lives. Sullivan's Island looks at the rigors of Catholicism during the early sixties, shattered childhood innocence, betrayal and revenge and the magic of Lowcountry life.
The protagonist, Susan Hamilton Hayes is in her early forties when we meet her. She is the wife of Tom, a prominent Charleston attorney and the mother of their daughter, Beth. In the prologue, we watch her life implode and then watch and learn how she puts it back together with great humor and pure grit.
We travel back with her to revisit the bitter disappointments of her childhood until she discovers decades later that those juvenile conundrums and challenges gave her the strength to face her adult years. And, most of those lessons were taught to her by Livvie Singleton, an African American woman, descended from slavery.
The Lowcountry itself as important as any character in Sullivan's Island, because its rich history and great beauty teach all the characters who they are and where they belong on the planet. Perhaps most importantly, the Lowcountry and the night sky of Sullivan's Island guide the characters to connect with the spiritual side of life and show them that love never dies. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—Sullivan's Island, North Carolina, USA
• Education—Fashion Institute of America
• Currently—lives in New Jersey and on Sullivan Island
An author who has helped to put the South Carolina Lowcountry on the literary map, Dorothea Benton Frank hasn't always lived near the ocean, but the Sullivan's Island native has a powerful sense of connection to her birthplace. Even after marrying a New Yorker and settling in New Jersey, she returned to South Carolina regularly for visits, until her mother died and she and her siblings had to sell their family home. "It was very upsetting," she told the Raleigh News & Observer. "Suddenly, I couldn't come back and walk into my mother's house. I was grieving."
After her mother's death, writing down her memories of home was a private, therapeutic act for Frank. But as her stack of computer printouts grew, she began to try to shape them into a novel. Eventually a friend introduced her to the novelist Fern Michaels, who helped her polish her manuscript and find an agent for it.
Published in 2000, Frank's first "Lowcountry tale," Sullivan's Island made it to the New York Times bestseller list. Its quirky characters and tangled family relationships drew comparisons to the works of fellow southerners Anne Rivers Siddons and Pat Conroy (both of whom have provided blurbs for Frank's books). But while Conroy's novels are heavily angst-ridden, Frank sweetens her dysfunctional family tea with humor and a gabby, just-between-us-girls tone. To her way of thinking, there's a gap between serious literary fiction and standard beach-blanket fare that needs to be filled.
"I don't always want to read serious fiction," Frank explained to The Sun News of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. "But when I read fiction that's not serious, I don't want to read brain candy. Entertain me, for God's sake." Since her debut, she has faithfully followed her own advice, entertaining thousands of readers with books Pat Conroy calls "hilarious and wise" and characters Booklist describes as "sassy and smart,."
These days, Frank has a house of her own on Sullivan's Island, where she spends part of each year. "The first thing I do when I get there is take a walk on the beach," she admits. Evidently, this transplanted Lowcountry gal is staying in touch with her soul.
Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:
• Before she started writing, Frank worked as a fashion buyer in New York City. She is also a nationally recognized volunteer fundraiser for the arts and education, and an advocate of literacy programs and women's issues.
• Her definition of a great beach read—"a fabulous story that sucks me in like a black hole and when it's over, it jettisons my bones across the galaxy with a hair on fire mission to convince everyone I know that they must read that book or they will die."
• When asked about her favorite books, here is what she said:
After working your way through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, of course, you have to read Gone with the Wind a billion times, then [tackle these authors].
The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood; A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley; The Red Tent by Anita Diamant; Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler; Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King; Making Waves and The Sunday Wife by Cassandra King; Islands by Anne Rivers Siddons; Rich in Love, Fireman's Fair, Dreams of Sleep, and Nowhere Else on Earth (all three) by Josephine Humphrey. (Author bio and interview from Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
Frank's debut novel is a story of redemption set in South Carolina's steamy low country. Susan Hamilton Hayes's comfortable Charleston existence is shattered when she finds her husband in bed with another woman. Faced with a failed marriage, a confused teenage daughter and a mediocre job, she sets about the business of healing. Slowly, supported by visits to her sister in their childhood home on sleepy Sullivan's Island, Susan becomes a successful newspaper columnist, regains her confidence as a woman (despite a hilariously deflating date) and finally explores the death of her complex, abusive father decades before. Chapters alternate between the present and 1963, the year her father died, as Susan faces both the strength and the damaging effects of her family legacy. The ending—complete with a perfect suitor reemerging from Susan's youth—is almost too picture perfect to ring true but both the setting and the characters are blazingly authentic. Frank evokes the eccentric Hamilton family and their feisty Gullah housekeeper with originality and conviction; Susan herself—smart, sarcastic, funny and endearingly flawed—makes a lively and memorable narrator. Thanks to these scrappily compelling portraits, this is a rich read.
Publishers Weekly
Set on the coast of South Carolina, this book explores one woman's journey from a contentedly married middle-aged wife and mother to a newly divorced woman looking back on her past for reassurance and to the future for some means of regaining her self-esteem. The story opens with Susan walking in on her husband and his young lover, a shocking surprise to her and an annoyance to him. Susan escalates the situation by throwing them both out, packing her husband's toiletries, and then beginning a new chapter. The tale moves back and forth between present and past as Susan reminisces about her South Carolina Lowcountry upbringing, with all of its "geechee" and Gullah cadences and the African American housekeeper who raised her and her siblings. Throughout, Susan draws strength and support from her sister, and her appreciation for her roots deepens as she tries to come to terms with divorce and raising a teenager. Frank's novel deals with dating, divorce, family life, and teenagers in an outrageously funny way. Conversely, there is a bittersweet nostalgia that permeates a life that seems familiar to us all. Joyce Bean does a highly credible job of evoking Southern pluck and sass as she moves easily among characters. Those who enjoy Pat Conroy or Anne Rivers Siddons will not be disappointed. Recommended for all public libraries. —Gloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll., Kansas City, MO
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What is the Lowcountry and how important is it to the story of Sullivan's Island?
2. What is the Gullah culture and how did it impact the psyche of Susan Hamilton Hayes and her siblings? And, did Livvie Singleton's legacy have an impact on Susan's daughter, Beth?
3. Would you say that it was better to have come of age in the sixties or the nineties and what are the principal differences in those decades from Susan's point of view. Is she right?
4. Susan makes a claim that the world has been made better and safer by the people of her generation. What do you think?
5. Susan's relationship with Livvie is a powerful one as is her relationship with her own mother. Would you say that her mother's weakness was as valuable to her as Livvie's strength? And, would you describe Livvie and Susan's mother, MC as frustrated by their positions in life?
6. Susan's father, Hank is a complicated man. Would you say that, if he were a young parent today, that he could be convicted of child abuse? And, why didn't Marvin Struthers have him arrested for it in 1963? How have attitudes changed about parent's rights to discipline their children?
7. Susan's grandfather, Tipa is a classic example of a southern gentleman of his day. Was his bigotry understandable for the early 1960's? Discuss how the love Susan felt for Livvie grew against the narrow mindedness of her grandfather. Do you think that she loved her grandfather and indeed, did she love her parents?
8. Should Susan have taken Tom back? How realistic is forgiveness and reconciliation in the face of blatant adultery of Tom's variety? How well did she handle explaining it to Beth and then coping with her relationship with Tom and Beth?
9. Why did Simon Rifkin play such a long lasting role in Susan's life? Was she naïve about him or were they fated to be together? Is there such a thing as fate?
10 Is it dangerous to love someone with limits on the amount of affection and loyalty you intend to allot them? What happens when Susan and Maggie talk about being stingy with affection and commitment?
11. The south is known for its ghost stories and tales of the inexplicable. Do you think that the mirror described in Sullivan's Island was believable? And, if not, who among you has had something happen that defied scientific explanation?
12. How critical is complete truth in a marriage? Is anyone ever completely honest with someone who holds the immediate stability and the near future in their hands? When is lying permissible? And, when a lie is exposed, how forgiving are you?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Still Missing
Chevy Stevens 2010
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250049513
Summary
On the day she was abducted, Annie O’Sullivan, a thirty-two year old realtor, had three goals—sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever-patient boyfriend.
The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she's about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all. Interwoven with the story of the year Annie spent as the captive of psychopath in a remote mountain cabin, which unfolds through sessions with her psychiatrist, is a second narrative recounting events following her escape—her struggle to piece her shattered life back together and the ongoing police investigation into the identity of her captor.
The truth doesn’t always set you free.
Still Missing is that rare debut find—a shocking, visceral, brutal and beautifully crafted debut novel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Born—1973
• Where—Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—N/A
• Awards—International Thriller Writers Award
• Currently—lives on Vancouver Island, B.E.
Chevy Stevens grew up on a ranch on Vancouver Island and still calls the island home. For most of her adult life she worked in sales, first as a rep for a giftware company and then as a Realtor.
At open houses, waiting between potential buyers, she spent hours scaring herself with thoughts of horrible things that could happen to her. Her most terrifying scenario, which began with being abducted, was the inspiration for Still Missing. After six months Chevy sold her house and left real estate so she could finish the book.
Chevy enjoys writing thrillers that allow her to blend her interest in family dynamics with her love of the west coast lifestyle. When she’s not working on her next book, she’s hiking with her husband and dog in the local mountains. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Still Missing runs deeper than the chills it delivers, the surprises it holds and the resilience of its main character. Ms. Stevens makes Annie a strong, smart woman who won’t stop fighting to regain her sanity and equilibrium. She can’t come back until she knows why she was taken away.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
The strength of the novel lies not in its characters or insights but in a shrewdly calculated, suspenseful plot that uncorks one surprise after another.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post
This debut novel has the power to shock and awe with its explosively frightening premise about a woman who is kidnapped by a stranger and held against her will for more than year. It starts with a very scary abduction. Annie O'Sullivan is a real-estate agent, and her captor comes for her at an open house. What happens to Annie during her captivity is heartbreaking, stomach-turning, outrageously immoral and frightening. Equally unimaginable is the catalyst for her kidnapping. This is one scary novel with a new twist on the classic kidnap and conspiracy story. Still Missing by Vancouver Island native and resident Chevy Stevens is sure to rock lovers of the thriller genre.
USA Today
Crackling with suspense this debut thriller stars Annie O'Sullivan, a young Realtor who recounts her year-long ordeal as a captive of a rapist she calls simply "The Freak." Her imprisonment, escape, and fraught reentry into ordinary life will have you glued to the page.
People
(Starred review.) Stevens’s impressive debut, a thriller set on Vancouver Island, pulsates with suspense that gets a power boost from the jaw-dropping but credible closing twist. In psychiatric sessions, Annie O’Sullivan, a 32-year-old realtor with a nice boyfriend and a demanding mother, describes her year-long ordeal as the captive of a rapist. The intense plot alternates between Annie’s creepy confinement, her escape, and her attempts to readjust to real life, from going to the bathroom when she wants to managing her own meals. Still, Annie knows that a large part of her soul is “still missing.” Her transformation from victim adds to the believability of the enthralling plot.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) On a sunny August afternoon, realtor Annie O'Sullivan is just about to end an open house showing when a friendly, nicely dressed man appears. What seems to be a lucky break is really just the beginning of Annie's yearlong ordeal. During sessions with her psychologist, Annie takes the reader back to her abduction and narrates how she struggled to survive during and after the horror. Since the reader is reliving the events through Annie's own retelling, the material can be tough to take. That emotional challenge is alleviated by Annie's flashes of humor and defiance. In her mind, once a victim does not mean one forever. Verdict: While there is physical danger in what Annie experiences, the suspense is in her psychological struggle. Author praise of this highly touted debut includes comparisons to Karin Slaughter and Lisa Gardner, and those authors' fans will like this thriller. While this may be a stretch, the "what would I do" aspect of the reading experience may make this a match for some Jodi Picoult readers as well. Highly recommended. —Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Stevens’s blistering debut follows a kidnap victim from her abduction to her escape—and the even more horrifying nightmare that follows. One moment, Vancouver Island realtor Annie O’Sullivan is taking one last client, a quiet, well-spoken man with a nice smile, through the property where she’s holding an open house; the next moment, she’s being marched out to a van at gunpoint, unaware that it’s the last time for months that she’ll see the sky or breathe the open air. The man who’s taken her calls himself David; she calls him The Freak. And her ordeal over the next year, described in unsparing detail in a series of lacerating sessions with her psychiatrist, indicates that her name is a lot more accurate than his.... A grueling, gripping demonstration of melodrama’s darker side.
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 Still Missing:
1. How would you describe Annie's character...especially those qualities that enable her to survive her ordeal at the hands of The Freak? How well might you have fared?
2. At some point during captivity, Annie begins to almost like The Freak. She goes to far as to admit that "sometimes he's kinda sweet." Although identifying with a captor is a known phenomenon—referred to as the "Stockholm Syndrome" in psychiatric parlance—how do those feelings develop in Annie?
3. Are the early parts of the novel, the sex scenes, too lurid for your taste—do you consider them sensational. Or are they an integral part of the plot, necessary for us to grasp Annie's tormented state?
4. Is "The Freak" a good name for Annie's abductor? What would you have called him? Describe him.
5. Chevy Stevens has written her book as a flashback, the present peering back into the past. We know at the outset, therefore, that Annie escapes her ordeal. Why might the author have structured her book in such a way?
6. David-The-Freak tells Annie that she is perfectly safe with him. There's a degree of ironic truth in his statement. How so? (Consider what happens when she escapes to freedom.)
7. Describe what Annie finds once she returns home—starting with her mother and the accident that took her father's and sibling's lives. Then there's the old boyfriend, Luke, as well as her best friend.
8. What prompts Annie to realize that her captivity was intentionally set-up by someone in her old life?
9. What is the significance of the title, "Still Missing"?
10. In all, does this book deliver? Were you held in suspense? Or did you find it predictable? Was the ending satisfying?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Sula
Toni Morrison, 1973
Knopf Doubleday
174 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400033430
Summary
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio.
Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth—February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A., Cornell,
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle
Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY
With her incredible string of lyrical, imaginative, and adventurous modern classics Toni Morrison lays claim to being one of America's best novelists. Race issues are at the heart of many of Morrison's most enduring novels, from the ways that white concepts of beauty affect a girl's self image in The Bluest Eye to themes of segregation in Sulu and slavery in her signature work Beloved. Through it all, Morrison relates her tales with lyrical eloquence and spellbinding mystery.
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison's unique approach to writing stems from a childhood spent steeped in folklore and mythology. Her family reveled in sharing these often tales, and their commingling of the fantastic and the natural would become a key element in her work when she began penning original tales of her own.
The other majorly influential factor in her writing was the racism she experienced firsthand in, as Jet magazine described it, the "mixed and sometimes hostile neighborhood" of Lorain, Ohio. When Morrison was only a toddler, her home was set afire by racists while her family was still inside of it. During times such as these, she found strength in her father, who instilled in her a great sense of dignity. This pride in her cultural background would heavily influence her debut novel.
In The Bluest Eye, an eleven-year old black girl named Pecola prays every night for blue eyes, seeing them as the epitome of feminine beauty. She believes these eyes, symbolizing commonly held white concepts of attractiveness, would put an end to her familial woes, an end to her father's excessive drinking and her brother's meandering. They would give her self-esteem and purpose. The Bluest Eye is the first of Toni Morrison's cries for racial pride and it is an auspicious debut told with an eerie poeticism.
Morrison next tackled segregation in Sulu, which chronicles the friendship between two women who, much like the author, grew up in a small, segregated village in Ohio. Song of Solomon followed. Arguably her first bona fide classic and certainly her most lyrical work, Song of Solomon breathed with the mythology of Morrison's youth, a veritable modern folktale pivoting on an eccentric whimsically named Milkman Dead who spends his life trying to fly. This is one of Morrison's most breathtaking, most accomplished and fully dimensional novels, a story of powerful convictions told in an unmistakably original manner.
In Song of Solomon, Morrison created a distinct world where the supernatural commingles comfortably with the mundane, a setting that would reappear in her masterpiece, Beloved. Beloved is a ghost story quite unlike any other, a tale of guilt and love and the horrendous legacy of slavery. Taking place not long after the end of the Civil War, Beloved finds Sethe, a former slave, being haunted by the daughter she murdered to save the child from being sold into slavery. It is a gut wrenching story that is buoyed by its fantastical plot device and the sheer beauty of Morrison's prose.
Beloved so moved Morrison's literary peers that forty-eight of them signed an open letter published in the New York Times demanding she be recognizing for this major effort. Subsequently, the book won her a Pulitzer Prize. A year after publishing her next novel Jazz in 1992, she would become the very first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Towards the end of the century, Morrison's work became increasingly eclectic. She not only published another finely crafted, incendiary novel in Paradise, which systematically tracks the genesis of an act of mob violence, but she also published her first children's book The Big Box. In 2003, she published Love, her first novel in five years, a complex meditation on family and the way one man fuels the obsessions of several women. The following year she assembled a collection of photographs of school children taken during the era of segregation. What makes Remember: The Journey to School Integration so particularly haunting is that Morrison chose to compose dialogue imagining what the subjects of each photo may have been thinking. In 2008, Morrison published A Mercy.
That imagination, that willingness to take chances, to examine history through a fresh perspective, is such an integral part of Morrison's craft. She is as vital as any contemporary artist, and her stories may focus on the black American experience, but the eloquence, imaginativeness, and meaningfulness of her writing leaps high over any racial boundaries.
Extras
• Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume.
• In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.
• Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Morrison's novel is...vital and rich.... Her extravagantly beautiful, doomed characters are locked in a world where hope for the future is a foreign commodity, yet they are enormously, achingly alive. And this book about them—and about how their beauty is drained back and frozen—is a howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter.... Toni Morrison is someone who really knows how to clank a sentence...and her dialogue is so compressed and life-like that it sizzles. Morrison's skill at characterization is such that, by the end, it's as if an enormous but too severely framed landscape has been unrolled and inhabited by people who seem almost mythologically strong and familiar...they have a heroic quality, and it's hard to believe we haven't known them forever.
Sara Blackburn - New York Times
Sula and Nel grow up through this novel in a small town called The Bottom, in Medallion, Ohio and in doing so got through different issues, situations, and strains, because of race, socioeconomic status, traditions, sexual orientation and intercourse. Through these issues human emotions are shown and just how different people can think.
Nel Wright is an example of the black bourgeoisie, structured in traditional roles and conventional life, and Sula lives in stucturelessness and her mother and grandmother are viewed eccentric and loose. The girls come from opposites, but come together, in which is like two halves making a whole.
Sula’s breakthrough about life occurs when she over hears her mother say that she doesn’t like Sula although she loves her. The reader learns that a mother will always love a child but doesn’t have to like them showing the difference between liking and loving. This also shows the novels exploration of human emotions. After hearing this Sula is changed forever, realizing you can only live for yourself.
The girls grow into adulthood. Nel stayed in their hometown and went into a conventional life that she grew up in; she got married, had kids, and was a housewife. Sula left for 10 years, went to college and traveled the country having affairs with many men.
The two reunite after Sula’s return to The Bottom. She caused trouble for the whole town, by being a threat to their convention and traditional ways of life. Woman changed and became more understanding of their husbands, working hard to keep them home so that they don’t fall into Sula’s bed. They treated children better and each other better. Sula’s return although some viewed as almost evil, brought good fortune to The Bottom, because the people change for the better.
Sula then commits the ultimate betrayal to Nel. It is through this betrayal and Sula’s demise that it is shown that Sula is not good or evil, she is merely indifferent to all. The events of her life leading up to her death such as her mothers comment has left Sula with any way of understanding human emotion or ability to have emotions. Without Sula the town then falls apart without the influence of her "evil" helping them to be better.
This novel causes the reader to look at "good" and "evil" and see that the good can be evil and the evil can be good. In the end Nel realizes that in some ways she is like Sula and that their relationship was even more important then the betrayal that had occurred in the Novel.
Daniel Dawkins - African-American Fiction
(Audio version.) Hearing an author read her own work creates a special ambiance. To hear Morrison read a short, unabridged novel published 24 years ago, to hear in her voice how much she still values the writing, well, who could ask for more? The only drawback is that Morrison, while very much in tune with her characters, often lets her voice drop to a whisper, making these tapes difficult to listen to while driving and almost impossible on a highway with the window open. On the page, Sula is one of her more clearly defined novels—the friendship and later hatred that envelopes the lives of two black women from "the bottom"—but the imagistic nature of the writing means listeners may have to replay passages if they want to follow the action. A small price to pay for a masterpiece. —Rochelle Ratner, formerly with Soho Weekly News, NYC
Library Journal
Told from the points of view of many characters, Sula provides a multifaceted portrait of a community and, within it, a friendship. Morrison confronts superstition, the role of women in black society, the ravages of war, legacy, and the gray areas of morality and perception that don't make any of the preceding easy to define. Students studying this work might want to concentrate on characterization (Sula's mother Hannah and her grandmother Eva are as complex as Sula and Nel) and the rhythm of Morrison's prose, especially in the first-person sections. Morrison has proven through her body of work that she is one of America's premier novelists, a writer who can portray multiple levels of even the simplest plot. Since she has written so few novels (eight at this writing), readers should easily be able to familiarize themselves with all her books. For those who have not read Morrison, I recommend starting with this book or Song of Solomon since the others are either more demanding or, in the case of The Bluest Eye, not as complex.
Debbie Lee Wesselman - MostlyFiction.com
The novel...explores notions of good and evil through the friendship of two childhood friends who have witness the accidental death of a little boy. Nel admits to herself that she had blamed his death entirely on Sula and set herself up as the “good” half of the relationship. In this regard, Sula is a novel about ambiguity. It questions and examines the terms “good” and “evil,” often demonstrating that the two often resemble one another.
Moleskine Book Reviews - Mattviews.wordpress.com
Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of the quote at the start of the book, "Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.... I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart." (The Rose Tattoo) How does this set the stage for the novel.
2. The novel begins by telling the reader that the Bottom, the neighborhood above Medallion, will soon be gone, replaced by the Medallion City Golf Course. How does knowing that the Bottom will soon be gone influence the rest of the novel? How does this description imply that things are not what they appear to be on the surface?
3. What are some possible reasons Eva's decision to go downstairs and light the fire, "the smoke of which was in her hair for years"? How does this make you feel about her character? Was this an act of sacrifice or selfishness? Can Eva be described as "good" or "bad"?
4. Eva gave her children to a neighbor and returned 18 months later, minus one leg. What is the possible symbolic significance of Eva's missing leg? How does it tie into the theme of deceptive appearances in the novel?
5. Sula contains some adult language and themes. Is this book appropriate for high school students? Are African Americans portrayed in a positive or negative light in the book? What about the portrayal of white people?
6. The novel takes place over the course of 45 years. How do relations between the races change over the course of the novel? How are the inhabitants of the Bottom and Medallion changed by what's going on in the world around them?
7. One reviewer commented that Sula is "a complex story of friendship and disappointment, death and sex, desperation and vulnerability" (Gayle Sims, Knight-Ridder Newspaper). How would you characterize the novel?
8. Sula and Nel become friends and later seem to be each other's alter egos. How does Nel's decision to marry inform Sula's life? How does Sula's leaving influence Nel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell, 2010
Random House
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812976366
Summary
In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the most influential novelists in the world. He has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. The New York Times Book Review called him simply “a genius.” Now David Mitchell lends fresh credence to The Guardian’s claim that “each of his books seems entirely different from that which preceded it.” The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a stunning departure for this brilliant, restless, and wildly ambitious author, a giant leap forward by even his own high standards. A bold and epic novel of a rarely visited point in history, it is a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable.
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland.
But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings. As one cynical colleague asks, “Who ain’t a gambler in the glorious Orient, with his very life?”
A magnificent mix of luminous writing, prodigious research, and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the most impressive achievement of its eminent author. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 12, 1969
• Where—Southport, Lancashire, UK
• Education—B.A., M.A., University of Kent
• Awards—John Llewellyn Rhys Prize
• Currently—lives in County Cork, Ireland
David Mitchell is an English novelist, the author of several novels, two of which, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has lived in Italy, Japan and Ireland. Mitchell currently lives with his wife Keiko Yoshida and their two children in Ardfield, Clonakilty in County Cork, Ireland.
Early life
Mitchell was born in Southport in Merseyside, England, and raised in Malvern, Worcestershire. He was educated at Hanley Castle High School and at the University of Kent, where he obtained a degree in English and American Literature followed by an M.A. in Comparative Literature. He lived in Sicily for a year, then moved to Hiroshima, Japan, where he taught English to technical students for eight years, before returning to England, where he could live on his earnings as a writer and support his pregnant wife.
Work
Mitchell's first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), moves around the globe, from Okinawa to Mongolia to pre-Millennial New York City, as nine narrators tell stories that interlock and intersect. The novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for best work of British literature written by an author under 35) and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His two subsequent novels, number9dream (2001) and Cloud Atlas (2004), were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2003, he was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World.
In 2012 his novel Cloud Atlas was made into a film. In recent years he has also written opera libretti. Wake, based on the 2000 Enschede fireworks disaster and with music by Klaas de Vries, was performed by the Dutch Nationale Reisopera in 2010. For his other opera, Sunken Garden, he collaborated with the Dutch composer Michel van der Aa. It premiered in 2013 with the English National Opera.
Mitchell's sixth novel, The Bone Clocks, was released on September 2nd, 2014. In an interview in The Spectator, Mitchell said that the novel has "dollops of the fantastic in it", and is about "stuff between life and death." The book was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
Personal
In a Random House essay, Mitchell wrote:
I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but until I came to Japan to live in 1994 I was too easily distracted to do much about it. I would probably have become a writer wherever I lived, but would I have become the same writer if I'd spent the last six years in London, or Cape Town, or Moose Jaw, on an oil rig or in the circus? This is my answer to myself.
Mitchell has the speech disorder of stammering and considers the film The King's Speech (2010) to be one of the most accurate portrayals of what it's like to be a stammerer: "I'd probably still be avoiding the subject today had I not outed myself by writing a semi-autobiographical novel, Black Swan Green, narrated by a stammering 13 year old."
One of Mitchell's children is autistic, and in 2013 he and wife Keiko translated into English a book written by a 13-year-old Japanese boy with autism, The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism.
List of works
Novels
Ghostwritten (1999)
number9dream (2001)
Cloud Atlas (2004)
Black Swan Green (2006)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010)
The Bone Clocks (2014)
Slade House (2015)
Utopia Avenue (2020)
(Bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/4/2014.)
Book Reviews
David Mitchell has traded in the experimental, puzzlelike pyrotechnics of Ghostwritten and Number9Dream for a fairly straight-ahead story line and a historical setting. He's meticulously reconstructed the lost world of Edo-era Japan, and in doing so he's created his most conventional but most emotionally engaging novel yet: it's as if an acrobatic but show-offy performance artist, adept at mimicry, ventriloquism and cerebral literary gymnastics, had decided to do an old-fashioned play and, in the process, proved his chops as an actor.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
If any readers have doubted that David Mitchell is phenomenally talented and capable of vaulting wonders on the page, they have been heretofore silent. Mitchell is almost universally acknowledged as the real deal. His best-known book, Cloud Atlas, is one of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is—and should be—read by any student of contemporary fiction…[The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet] confirms Mitchell as one of the more fascinating and fearless writers alive.
Dave Eggers - New York Times Book Review
[Mitchell] startles us again with a rich historical romance set in feudal Japan, an epic of sacrificial love, clashing civilizations and enemies who won't rest until whole family lines have been snuffed out. Yes, the novelist who's been showing us the future of fiction has published a classic, old-fashioned tale. It's not too early to suggest that Mitchell can triumph in any genre he chooses.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
When a Dutch trader falls in love with a Japanese midwife who is also the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor in 19th-century Japan, you can be sure that the emotional and cultural clashes will be significant. The Thousand Days of Jacob de Zoet is a historical romance novel by Davd Mitchell, gifted author of Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. Here, Mitchell melds history and literature into a satisfying blend.
Christian Science Monitor
Mitchell’s rightly been hailed as a virtuoso genius for his genre-bending, fiercely intelligent novels Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. Now he takes something of a busman’s holiday with this majestic historical romance set in turn-of-the-19th-century Japan, where young, naive Jacob de Zoet arrives on the small manmade island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor as part of a contingent of Dutch East Indies officials charged with cleaning up the trading station’s entrenched culture of corruption. Though engaged to be married in the Netherlands, he quickly falls in hopeless love with Orito Aibagawa, a Dutch-trained Japanese midwife and promising student of Marinus, the station’s resident physician. Their “courtship” is strained, as foreigners are prohibited from setting foot on the Japanese mainland, and the only relationships permitted between Japanese women and foreign men on Dejima are of the paid variety. Jacob has larger trouble, though; when he refuses to sign off on a bogus shipping manifest, his stint on Dejima is extended and he’s demoted, stuck in the service of a vengeful fellow clerk. Meanwhile, Orito’s father dies deeply in debt, and her stepmother sells her into service at a mountaintop shrine where her midwife skills are in high demand, she soon learns, because of the extraordinarily sinister rituals going on in the secretive shrine. This is where the slow-to-start plot kicks in, and Mitchell pours on the heat with a rescue attempt by Orito’s first love, Uzaemon, who happens to be Jacob’s translator and confidant. Mitchell’s ventriloquism is as sharp as ever; he conjures men of Eastern and Western science as convincingly as he does the unscrubbed sailor rabble. Though there are more than a few spots of embarrassingly bad writing (“How scandalized Nagasaki shall be, thinks Uzaemon, if the truth is ever known”), Mitchell’s talent still shines through, particularly in the novel’s riveting final act, a pressure-cooker of tension, character work, and gorgeous set pieces. It’s certainly no Cloud Atlas, but it is a dense and satisfying historical with literary brawn and stylistic panache.
Publishers Weekly
It is a rare novel that's so captivating that the reader feels transported through time and fully immersed in an unfamiliar culture and place, and this is such a novel. Mitchell, a Man Booker Prize finalist for Cloud Atlas, returns with a story set at the turn of the 18th century around Dejima, an artificial island located in Nagasaki Bay and used as a trade outpost by the Dutch East Indies Company. A small group of mostly Dutch merchants lives on Dejima under the watchful eye of Japanese guards, government officials, and translators. Clerk Jacob de Zoet comes to Dejima for a period of five years to make his fortune and return to marry his wealthy fiancee in Holland. An honest man, Jacob intends to put the company's financial records in order and root out corruption, but after meeting midwife Orito Aibagawa, he becomes entangled in events far more sinister than forged ledgers. Verdict: this painstakingly researched and original novel is hard to pin to any one genre, for it is a historical novel and cultural study with plenty of intrigue and mystery mixed in. It is intelligent and utterly readable at the same time. Highly recommended. —Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal
Another Booker Prize nomination is likely to greet this ambitious and fascinating fifth novel—a full-dress historical, and then some-from the prodigally gifted British author (Black Swan Green, 2006, etc.). In yet another departure from the postmodern Pynchonian intricacy of his earlier fiction, this is the story of a devout young Dutch Calvinist (the eponymous Jacob) sent in 1799 to Japan, where the Dutch East India Company, aka the VOC, had opened trade routes more than two centuries earlier. But now the Company is threatened by the envious British Empire, which seeks to appropriate the Far East's rich commercial opportunities. Jacob's purpose is to acquire sufficient wealth and experience to earn the hand of his fiancee Anna. But his mission is to serve as a ship's clerk while simultaneously investigating charges of corruption against the Company's powerful Chief Resident. When a scandal involving the seizure of the much-desired commodity of copper is manipulated to implicate Jacob, he is posted to the artificially constructed island of Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, becoming a de facto prisoner of an insular little world of rigorously patterned and controlled cultural-and commercial-rituals. Meanwhile, the story of Aibagawa Orita, a facially disfigured (hence unmarriageable) midwife authorized to study with the Company's doctor (the saturnine Marinus, a kind of Pangloss to Jacob's earnest Candide), punished for having aspired beyond her station, and the moving story of her planned escape from servitude and reunion with the beloved (Uzaeman) forbidden to marry her (which contains deft echoes of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Ondaatje's The English Patient), mocks, as it exalts, Jacob's concealed love for this extraordinary woman. The story climaxes as British forces challenge the Dutch hold on the East's riches, and Jacob's long ordeal hurtles toward its conclusion. It's as difficult to put this novel down as it is to overestimate Mitchell's virtually unparalleled mastery of dramatic construction, illuminating characterizations and insight into historical conflict and change. Comparisons to Tolstoy are inevitable, and right on the money.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book: • How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet:
1. What is the purpose of Dejima? Why do the Japanese wish to isolate European traders from their society, walling them off on a man-made island?
2. How do the Europeans and the Japanese view one another in this novel? What stereotypes do the Europeans have toward the Japanese? Why are Europeans determined to break through the barriers errected by the Shoguns—are their motives humanistic or mercenary...principled or unprincipled?
3. In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, David Mitchell said his intention was to "write a bicultural novel, where Japanese perspectives are given an equal weight to Dutch/European perspectives." Do you think Mitchell succeeded in being even-handed to both cultures?
4. This book also explores the clash between science and superstition; or the European enlightenment and intuition. How do those two different ways of knowing play out in The Thousand Autumns?
5. Jacob is a devout Christian. Are his religious ideals challenged or altered in any way? How do the Japanese view the religion of the Europeans?
6. Jacob is referred to as "an honest soul in a human swamp of crocodiles, a sharp quill among blunt nibs." How well does this passage describe his character? How else would you describe Jacob; what other personality/character traits does he possess?
7. Is Jacob naive to see right and wrong as "moral bookkeeping" and to believe "all that matters is truth"? How difficult is it in this book to define, or discern, or prove what is true?
8. Mitchell is interested in language. How powerful are the story's translators? What role do translators play in protecting—or distorting—meaning and truth through the use of language? Can translation ever penetrate the meaning of another language?
9. Talk about the numerous moral dilemmas faced by Ogawa Uzaemon? Does he make the right choices...with regards to his parents, his wife, Orito, and Jacob?
10. Discuss Japanese society: especially the highly stratified social order, including the role and of women and the restrictions placed on them. Is Japanese society more, or less, hierarchical than European society?
11. How would you describe Orito Aibagawa? What is her role in Japanese society—in what ways does Japanese culture restrict, even debase Orito. What makes Jacob fall in love with her when he is already committed to Anna back home?
12. Why does Orito decide to return to the shrine? Would you have returned?
13. Discuss John Penhaligon and the pivotal decisions he makes in the novel. Why does the Phoebus turn away from Dejima?
14. Who wins the game of Go—the magistrate or the abbot?
15. Which of the book's three sections do you find most engaging...or least engaging?
16. How would you classify this novel—as a suspense-thriller, mystery, melodrama, cultural study, or historical novel? How would you describe it to someone?
17. Was the book's ending satisfying? How else might it have ended? Does Jacob die a happy or fulfilled man? Where do you think he would have preferred to end his days?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The 19th Wife
David Ebershoff, 2008
Random House
514 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812974157
Summary
Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain.
Sweeping and lyrical, spellbinding and unforgettable, David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense.
It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.
Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds—a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.
And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—Pasadena, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; University of Chicago;
Keio University (Tokyo)
• Awards—Rosenthal Foundation Award from American
Academy of Arts & Letters; Lambda Literary Award
• Currently—lives in New York City
David Ebershoff is the author of two novels, Pasadena and The Danish Girl , and a short-story collection, The Rose City. His fiction has won a number of awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Award, and has been translated into ten languages to critical acclaim.
Ebershoff is editor-at-large at Random House, where he edits a wide range of writers including novelists David Mitchell, Charles Bock, Gary Shteyngart, Phil LaMarche, poet Billy Collins, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi, journalist Azadeh Moaveni, and historians Hugh Thomas and Ronald C. White, Jr. Ebershoff was Jane Jacobs's editor on her final two books and was Norman Mailer's editor for the last five years of his life. Working with Truman Capote's estate, he oversees the Capote publications for Random House, and was the editor of The Complete Stories of Truman Capote, Summer Crossing, and Portraits and Observations. He was formerly the publishing director of Random House's classics imprint, the Modern Library. He also writes for Conde Nast Traveler.
Ebershoff has taught creative writing at New York University and Princeton and is currently an adjunct assistant professor in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. For many years he was the publishing director of the Modern Library, and he is currently an editor-at-large for Random House. He lives in New York City. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[Ebershoff's] great collage of a novel mixes the early history of the Mormon Church with the story of a modern-day murder in a breakaway Mormon cult. Readers of Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's bestseller about the violent beginnings of Mormonism in the early 19th century and a double murder carried out by Mormon fundamentalists in 1984, will recognize this mingling of old and new. But Ebershoff has produced a different kind of book. For one thing, he's made up his modern-day adventure and fictionalized the historical record to shape his own ends. And more important, he's produced a novel that poses engaging challenges for the faithful in any denomination without discounting the essential value of faith. The result is a book packed with historical illumination, unforgettable characters and the deepest questions about the tenacity of belief.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Despite the high hurdles Ebershoff has erected, the novel flows surprisingly well…In a less talented writer's hands, The 19th Wife could have turned into a Rube Goldberg contraption. But in the end the multiplicity of perspectives serves to broaden Ebershoff's depiction not only of polygamy, but also of the people whose lives it informs. And this gives his novel a rare sense of moral urgency.
Louisa Thomas - New York Times
This ambitious third novel tells two parallel stories of polygamy. The first recounts Brigham Young's expulsion of one of his wives, Ann Eliza, from the Mormon Church; the second is a modern-day murder mystery set in a polygamous compound in Utah. Unfolding through an impressive variety of narrative forms—Wikipedia entries, academic research papers, newspaper opinion pieces—the stories include fascinating historical details. We are told, for instance, of Brigham Young's ban on dramas that romanticized monogamous love at his community theatre; as one of Young's followers says, "I ain't sitting through no play where a man makes such a cussed fuss over one woman." Ebershoff demonstrates abundant virtuosity, as he convincingly inhabits the voices of both a nineteenth-century Mormon wife and a contemporary gay youth excommunicated from the church, while also managing to say something about the mysterious power of faith.
The New Yorker
This sweeping epic is a compelling and original work set in 1875, when one woman attempts to rid America of polygamy. Ebershoff intertwines his tale with that of a 20th-century murder mystery in Utah, allowing the two stories to twist and turn into a marvelous literary experience. With such a sprawling tale to relate, a few narrators (Kimberly Farr, Rebecca Lowman, Arthur Morey and Daniel Passer) divide up the roles and deliver a solid, professional reading, true to Ebershoff's prose.
Publishers Weekly
Ebershoff (Pasadena, 2002, etc.) takes a promising historical premise and runs with it-perhaps a couple of dozen pages too long. He juxtaposes the world of modern polygamous families down on the remote Utah-Arizona line with the life of a junior wife of 19th-century Mormon patriarch Brigham Young. Junior in terms of both age and pecking order, Annie Young didn't much like the gig; she renounced life as a plural wife and broke from the church to publish a book about the horrors of polygamy. Her story inspired much antipathy among Young's anti-Mormon neighbors; Ebershoff borrows elsewhere from history to recapitulate a San Francisco newspaper's condemnation of Brigham Young as "a confidence man in the grand tradition of the hoodwinkers of the West." Meanwhile, in the present, a young Mormon man begins to examine the life he is falling away from, returning to the fictitious town of Mesadale, with its "few hundred houses now, warehouses for a family of seventy-five." (That would be Colorado City, Ariz., in real life-a place that hnineteeas recently made national news for its polygamous customs.) Things are not as placid and well ordered as they seem in the red-rock plateau country. Young Jordan's mom, one of several wives, has apparently shot dear old dad as he was simultaneously gambling and recruiting new companionship online. As for Jordan—well, he's a mess, doing decidedly unsaintly things in order to keep body and soul together. Many histories intertwine in these pages, and many voices are heard from, ranging from the stately cadences of Victorian steel-nib prose to the most modern lingo. Apostasy and self-discovery ensue. Reminiscent of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose in scope and ambition, though the narrative sometimes drags.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The first part of the novel, “Two Wives,” contains prefaces to two very different books. What did you think when you started reading The 19th Wife? Which story interested you the most?
2. Ann Eliza Young says, “Faith is a mystery.” How does Ebershoff play with this metaphor? What are the mysteries in The 19th Wife? What does the novel say about faith?
3. What are your impressions of Ann Eliza Young, and how do those impressions change over the course of the novel? Do you trust her as a narrator?
4. Brigham Young was one of the most dynamic and complex figures in nineteenth-century America. How does the novel portray him? Do you come to understand his deep convictions? In the story of his marriage to Ann Eliza, he essentially gets the last word. Why?
5. What kind of man is Chauncey Webb? And Gilbert? What do they tell you about polygamy?
6. Jordan is an unlikely detective. What makes him a good sleuth? What are his blind spots?
7. Many of the people who help Jordan–Mr. Heber, Maureen, Kelly, and Tom–are Mormons. What do you think Ebershoff is saying by this?
8. Like many mysteries, Jordan’s story is a quest. What is he searching for?
9. Why do you think Ebershoff wrote the novel with so many voices? How do the voices play off one another? Who is your favorite narrator? Who is your least favorite?
10. Why do you think Ebershoff wrote a fictional memoir by Ann Eliza Young, and why are some chapters missing? As he says in his Author’s Note, the real Ann Eliza Young actually wrote two memoirs: Wife No. 19, first published in 1875, and a second book, Life in Mormon Bondage, which came out in 1908. Based on your reading of The 19th Wife, what kind of memoirist do you think the real Ann Eliza Young was?
11. One reviewer has said The 19th Wife is “that rare book that effortlessly explicates and entertains all at once.” Do you agree? How does the novel manage this balance?
12. Were you surprised by how the stories of Ann Eliza and Jordan come together? Did you predict it?
13. Does Jordan’s story end as you hoped it would? Does it end as Jordan hoped it would?
14. What do you think ultimately happened to Ann Eliza Young?
(Questions issued by publisher.)