North Star Conspiracy (A Glynis Tyron Mystery)
Miriam Grace Monfredo, 1993
Penguin Group USA
353 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425147207
Summary
The year is 1854. In Seneca Falls, New York, everyone is busy with the opening of a new theater, no one notices the death of a freed slave. As a supporter of the Underground Railroad, Glynis hears information that raises her suspicions, and soon discovers more than she wants to know about some of the so-called sympathizers.
Glynis Tryon, the delightful Seneca Falls, New York, librarian introduced in Seneca Falls Inheritance, returns, still balancing her own life against the momentous events of the times. With sure authenticity, the author evokes the atmosphere of 1854, seven years before the Civil War, and brings to life the vivid cast of characters involved. A local election is pending, from which Glynis and Elizabeth Cady Stanton hope will come gains for women's rights. A wealthy resident has started Seneca Falls's first theater, and its production of Macbeth looms large in the story.
Glynis herself faces a wrenching decision: Constable Cullen Stuart wants her as his wife when he moves west to become a Pinkerton man. Warm as her regard for Cullen may be, Glynis is reluctant, knowing how her life must change after marriage. Meanwhile, Seneca Falls has become an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Fugitive slaves following the North Star to Canada find support from many of the town's inhabitants, including Glynis.
It is a difficult commitment at best, and when complicated by murder, a perilous one as well. Once again, Miriam Grace Monfredo has combined historical events, a moving personal story, and an engrossing mystery in a work of extraordinary interest.
North Star is the second of six books in the Seneca Falls Mystery Series. The series includes (in order): Seneca Falls Inheritance, North Star Conspiracy, Blackwater Spirits, Through a Gold Eagle, The Stalking Horse, and Must the Maiden Die. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Miriam Grace Monfredo, a former librarian and a historian, lives in Rochester, New York. This is the second "Seneca Falls Mystery" series. A previous "Seneca Falls Mystery," The Stalking Horse, was chosen by the Voice of Youth Advocacy as one of 1998’s best adult mysteries for young adults and received a “best” review in Library Journal’s young adult section. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Fresh, original and creative, this lively [work] brings together a cross section of women from Seneca Falls in 1848—a librarian, women's rights activist, former slave, brothel keeper, plantation wife/slave owner and town cultural advocate—each with strong opinions that will reflect on the history of activism prior to the Civil War.
Syracuse Post-Standard
North Star Conspiracy is a reasonably serious mystery that is also a good bit of fun, set in 1854. With her friends Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Seneca Falls librarian Glynis Tryon also works on such feminist issues as suffrage. Glynis is no dilettante; when she has an opportunity early in the book to marry a man she truly cares for, she turns him down. To assent would man the end of her career. Fully involved in the life of the community, Glynis becomes caught in a web of intrigue that includes murder and shows herself a capable ratiocinator. Like other entries in the series, the novel features historical notes at the end detailing people, places, and things the reader meets or hears about in the course of the story. A bit too much late-20th-century sensibility manifests itself in Glynis Tryon's point of view, but the story remains enjoyable.
Grant Burns - Librarians in Fiction, A Critical Bibliography
In 1854, six years after her adventures with Elizabeth Cady Stanton described in Seneca Falls Inheritance, librarian Glynis Tryon returns for a suspense-filled adventure based on the northward escape of fugitive slaves. Women's rights' advocate Glynis rejects the marriage proposal of her friend Constable Cullen Stuart, who leaves Seneca Falls, N.Y., to join the Pinkertons. Missing him, she busies herself in the planning of the town's new theater and the upcoming campaign for state assembly of a banker who favors women's rights. She is puzzled by both the recent suspicious death of a freed slave from Virginia and the murder of a slave-catcher who was last seen with a woman from the theater group. Then Niles, her landlady's son, returns from Virginia to announce his plans to marry Kiri, a slave whom he has convinced to run away. Glynis's role in helping Kiri farther along the Underground Railroad and her observations at Niles's trial in Virginia for abetting the slave's escape mesh seamlessly with details of the librarian's personal life in this intricately plotted, historically vivid, thoroughly satisfying mystery.
Publishers Weekly
Unmarried (by choice) librarian Glynis Tryon (Seneca Falls Inheritance) learns firsthand of the iniquities of slavery when her boardinghouse landlady's son Niles returns to their western New York home with Kiri—a beautiful mulatto slave he helped escape from a Virginia plantation. A slave-catcher is on their trail, and though Glynis manages to get Kiri to her sister's house in Rochester, a stop on the Underground Railroad, Niles is captured and returned to Virginia to stand trial. In Richmond to help Niles's lawyer, Glynis learns that three recent murders back home all tie in with Kiri—and with the murder of her fleeing family 13 years before by a villainous overseer, now living up north under another identity. With help from Constable Sundown and Cullen Stuart, a Pinkerton detective, Glynis and Kiri bait a trap for the villain and spring it during the debut performance of Macbeth at Seneca Falls's just-opened theater. Stimulating fare (despite a subplot or two too many) that effectively parallels the powerlessness of slaves and women—the disenfranchised—building to a dramatic courtroom sequence. Sojourner Truth, Matthew Brady, et al., appear in memorable cameos.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• Generic Discussion Questions
• Read-Think-Talk About a Book
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for North Star Conspiracy:
1. Why does Glynis refuse to marry Cullen Stuart, despite her fondness for him? In what ways would her life have changed as a married woman? You might use that question to segue into a discussion of the conditions for women in the mid-19th century. Does Monfredo make any connection between the powerlessness of white women and their slave counterparts?
2. On what basis does Glynis decide to help Kiri flee her captors? To what extent is an individual free—or compelled—to disobey laws that violate the conscience? ? Who decides when laws are unjust?
3. What is the effect of Monfredo's inserting real-life historical figures into her fictional world? Why might she use that technique? Does Monfredo's treatment of those historical individuals make them, or the era in which they lived, come alive for you?
4. Did Monfredo's book enable you learn more about the Underground Railroad and abolitionist movement? Monfredo has been praised for her historical accuracy, which brings up an interesting question—is the ability to appreciate history enhanced through fictional tellings? How useful did you find the mini-encyclopedia at the back of the book?
5. As has been said, "the past is never past. In what way does Kiri's past come back to haunt her?
6. What does the journey to Richmond reveal about the era's political divisiveness between northern abolitionists and southern slaveholders?
7. How does Glynis arrive at her courtroom revelation? What steps lead her to uncover the key evidence?
8. Does the entrapment of Thomas Farley make for a good ending...or an unrealistic one, forced or tacked on?
9. This is a mystery after all. Talk about how Monfredo buries clues, misleads the reader, uses plot twists, builds suspense, and reveals the solution? How well does she do all that? Did you find the revelation surprising...or predictable?
10. Finally, consider Monfredo's use of a theatrical production, Macbeth. How does it function in the story (think about role playing...)?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)
The Swan Thieves
Elizabeth Kostova, 2010
Little, Brown & Co.
564 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781607886693
Summary
Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe has a perfectly ordered life—solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient. In response, Marlowe finds himself going beyond his own legal and ethical boundaries to understand the secret that torments this genius, a journey that will lead him into the lives of the women closest to Robert Oliver and toward a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.
Ranging from American museums to the coast of Normandy, from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, from young love to last love, The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, the losses of history, and the power of art to preserve human hope. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 26, 1964
• Where—New London, Connecticut, USA
• Rasied—Knoxville, Tennessee
• Education—B.A., Yale; M.F.A. University of Michigan
• Awards—Hopwod Award for Novel-in-Progress; Quill Award; Book Sense Award
• Currently—lives in Michigan, USA
Elizabeth Johnson Kostova, an American author, is best known for her debut novel The Historian. Swan Thieves, her second novel, was released in 2010.
Kostova's interest in the Dracula legend began with the stories her father told her about the vampire when she was a child. The family lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia in 1972, while her father was teaching at a local university; during that year, the family traveled across Europe. According to Kostova, "It was the formative experience of my childhood."She "was fascinated by [her father's Dracula stories] because they were...from history in a way, even though they weren't about real history, but I heard them in these beautiful historic places." Kostova's interest in books and libraries began early as well. Her mother, a librarian, frequently took her and her sisters to the public library — they were each allowed to check out 30 books and had a special shelf for their library books.
As a child, she listened to recordings of Balkan folk music and became interested in the tradition. As an undergraduate at Yale, she sang in and directed a Slavic chorus. In 1989, she and some friends traveled to Eastern Europe, specifically Bulgaria and Bosnia, to study local musical customs. The recordings they made will be deposited in the Library of Congress. While Kostova was in Europe, the Berlin Wall collapsed, heralding the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, events which shaped her understanding of history.
Five years later, in 1994, when Kostova was hiking in the Appalachian Mountains with her husband, she had a flashback to those storytelling moments with her father and asked herself "what if the father were spinning his Dracula tales to his entranced daughter and Dracula was listening in? What if Dracula was still alive?" She immediately scratched out seven pages of notes into her writer's notebook. Two days later, she started work on the novel. At the time she was teaching English as a second language, creative writing, and composition classes at universities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and finished the book as she was obtaining her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Michigan. In order to write the book, she did extensive research about Eastern Europe and Vlad Tepes.
Kostova finished the novel in January 2004 and sent it out to a potential literary agent in March. Two months later and within two days of sending out her manuscript to publishers, Kostova was offered a deal—she refused it. The rights to the book were then auctioned off and Little, Brown and Company bought it for US$2 million (US$30,000 is typical for a first novel from an unknown author). Publishers Weekly explained the high price as a bidding war between firms believing that they might have the next Da Vinci Code within their grasp. One vice-president and associate publisher said "Given the success of The Da Vinci Code, everybody around town knows how popular the combination of thriller and history can be and what a phenomenon it can become." Little, Brown, and Co. subsequently sold the rights in 28 countries. The book was published in the United States on 14 June 2005.
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The novel blends the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula and has been described as a combination of genres, including Gothic novel, adventure novel, detective fiction, travelogue, postmodern historical novel, epistolary epic, and historical thriller. Kostova was intent on writing a serious work of literature and saw herself as an inheritor of the Victorian style. Although based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Historian is not a horror novel, but rather an eerie tale. The novel is concerned with questions about history, its role in society, and how it is represented in books, as well as the nature of good and evil. As Kostova explains, "Dracula is a metaphor for the evil that is so hard to undo in history." The evils brought about by religious conflict are a particular theme and the novel explores the relationship between the Christian West and the Islamic East.
Heavily promoted, the book became the first debut novel to land at number one on the the New York Times bestseller list and as of 2005 was the fastest-selling hardback debut novel in US history. In general, the reviews of the novel were mixed. Several reviewers noted that she described the setting of her novel well. However, some reviewers criticized the book's structure and its lack of tonal variety. Kostova received the 2006 Book Sense award for Best Adult Fiction and the 2005 Quill Award for Debut Author of the Year. Sony bought the film rights to the novel for $1.5 million.
In May 2007, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation was created. The Foundation helps support Bulgarian creative writing, the translation of contemporary Bulgarian literature into English, and friendship between Bulgarian authors and American and British authors.
Kostova's second novel, The Swan Thieves, was released in 2010, and The Shadow Land in 2017. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The many ardent admirers of The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 first novel, will be happy to learn that her second book offers plenty of the same pleasures. Like The Historian, the new novel ranges across a variety of richly described international locales, both antique and modern. There is once again an assortment of narratives, all of which converge to solve a central mystery. Kostova again pays punctilious attention to the details of her characters' working lives (archival scholarship in the first book, painting in the second). And although the two novels' subjects are worlds apart, there is a shared romantic premise, in which the past is forever imposing itself onto the present, the dead onto the living.
Donna Rifkind - Washington Post
The Swan Thieves revisits certain themes and strategies of [Elizabeth Kostov's 2005 debut novel] The Historian, chief among them an academic hero who is drawn into a quest for knowledge about the central mystery, only to develop an obsession that becomes the driving force of the plot. Each chapter marks a point of view shift from the previous one, with the narrative shared among a variety of characters telling the story in a variety of ways. The events range from the present moment back to the 19th century of the painters Beatrice de Clerval and her uncle Olivier Vignot, whose intertwined lives, letters, and paintings are at the heart of the story.This time out, Kostova's central character, Andrew Marlow, has a license to ask prying questions as he unravels the secrets and pursues the truth, because he is a psychiatrist. (Before Freud, genre quest novels depended on sleuths like Sherlock Holmes to play this role.) Even though Marlow comes across as a sensible, trained therapist, after only the briefest of encounters with his newly hospitalized patient, the renowned painter Robert Oliver, Marlow develops an obsessive desire to solve the mystery of why Oliver attempted to slash a painting in the National Gallery. Marlow is himself a painter, and the Oliver case has been given to him because of his knowledge of art. But Oliver is uncooperative and mute, though he conveniently gives Marlow permission to talk to anyone in his life before falling silent. Oliver's inexplicable behavior, which includes poring over a stolen cache of old letters written in French, triggers what I can only call a rampant countertransference response in Marlow, whose overwhelming obsession becomes a strange and frequently far-fetched journey of discovery as he persists to the point of trespass and invasion. Is this the crossing of the ultimate border promised by the ARC's jacket copy, the enactment of the fantasy of one's therapist developing an obsessive fascination that blots out all other reality? Less urgent in its events than The Historian, The Swan Thieves makes clear that Kostova's abiding subject is obsession. Legions of fans of the first book have been waiting impatiently, or perhaps even obsessively, for this novel. The Swan Thieves succeeds both in its echoes of The Historian and as it maps new territory for this canny and successful writer. —Katharine Weber
Publishers Weekly
A painting has been attacked at the National Gallery of Art, and the assailant—Robert Oliver, a painter of notoriety in his own right—isn't speaking. It is left to psychiatrist Andrew Marlow—a hobbyist painter himself—to unravel the puzzle of Robert's manic behavior. With a mysterious packet of letters and the testimony of Robert's ex-wife and ex-girlfriend as guides, Marlow dives into a mystery of romance and impressionist art dating back to late 19th-century France. Love and obsession are the primary themes of Kostova's long-awaited second novel (after The Historian), which stretches across three centuries and renders just the right amount of drama. The luxurious artistic detail and richly drawn characters will pull in readers, who will be hard-pressed to stop turning pages. Verdict: Fans of Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come and Somewhere in Time, both explorations of love across time and space, and readers of Tracy Chevalier and Audrey Niffenegger will enjoy Kostova's strong sophomore effort, which is sure to be a best seller and a suitable choice for book clubs. Highly recommended. —Leigh Wright, Bridgewater, NJ
Library Journal
Kostova follows up her blockbuster debut about the undead (The Historian, 2005) with a romance about a contemporary painter's obsession with an undiscovered 19th-century Impressionist. After he attempts to slash the painting Leda at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., respected artist Robert Oliver is committed to a mental hospital under the care of psychiatrist Andrew Marlow (think Heart of Darkness). A painter himself, Marlow is fascinated by his patient, who refuses to speak and paints the same dark-haired woman over and over. "When I asked him whether he was sketching from imagination or drawing a real person," Marlow remembers, "he ignored me more pointedly than ever." Then Robert lends Marlow a package of letters written in the late 1870s by aspiring painter Beatrice de Clerval Vignot to her husband's uncle Olivier Vignot, an established artist at the Paris Salon. Knowing he is stretching professional boundaries, Marlow goes to North Carolina to visit Robert's charming, pragmatic ex-wife and tracks down the spirited painter Mary Bertison, with whom Robert later lived in D.C. Both women loved the artist and felt they lost him to the woman in the painting. Marlow himself falls increasingly under Beatrice's spell as he reads letters tracing her growing feelings for Uncle Olivier. The psychiatrist, a 52-year-old bachelor, is also drawn to Mary despite the questionable professional ethics of dating a patient's ex-girlfriend. With Robert tucked away painting his Beatrice in silence, Marlow travels to Mexico with Mary, then alone to Paris to trace the life of the real Beatrice and track down her secret paintings of swans; short chapters set in 1879 reveal what happened to her and her work. Kostova's theme is creative obsession and what everyday boundaries can be broken in its name; the novel seems to favor the most romantic answer. Neither Robert's decisions nor Marlow's make a lot of sense, but lush prose and abundant drama will render logic beside the point for most readers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. At the beginning of Chapter 2, psychiatrist Andrew Marlow confesses that the story he is going to tell is “not only private but subject to my imagination as much as to the facts.” In what ways does this prove to be true, in the course of the book? How does Marlow’s imagination affect the telling of his
own story?
2. Each of the artists in the book—Robert, Marlow, Mary, Kate, Beatrice, and Olivieris faced with choices between art and personal life. What are some of these dilemmas, and how does each character resolve or at least experience them?
3. In Chapter 64, at their painting conference in Maine, Mary says to Robert, “‘I have the feeling that if I knew why you were still painting the same thing after so many years, then I would know you. I would know who you are.” Why does Robert paint Beatrice for years and how does his obsession with her shape his artwork? What other obsessions appear in the course of the book, in Robert and in other characters?
4. Landscapes play an important role in The Swan Thieves, both in life and on canvas. What are the major landscapes of the book, and what effect do they have on the characters?
5. In Chapter 95, just before Marlow flies to Paris to learn more about Beatrice de Clerval, Mary tells him, “‘Please just let her die properly, the poor woman.’” What does she mean by this? Why is it important to her?
6. The Swan Thieves is partly a study of love that bridges gaps across time and age—passion, mentoring, parenting. Which characters have these relationships? What do the old, or older, characters have to offer the younger ones? What do the younger ones offer their elders?
7. At many points in the story, artists paint or sketch one another. What are these occasions and how is each significant to the story?
8. In Etretat, as she considers her relationship with Olivier, Beatrice realizes that whatever happens between them “she must effect herself and live with later.” Is this true of other characters’ experiences? In what senses?
9. The myth of Leda and the Swan surfaces repeatedly in the narrative. Where do we encounter it and what is its significance in each of the main characters’ lives? What other swans make an appearance in the book?
10. Kate says of her second meeting with Robert Oliver, “His apparent unawareness of himself was mesmerizing.” What else mesmerizes other people about Robert? Why do some of the other characters find him compelling?
11. On leaving the National Gallery at the end of Chapter 7, Marlow notes “that mingled relief and disappointment one feels on departure from a great museum—relief at being returned to the familiar, less intense, more manageable world, and disappointment at that world’s lack of mystery.” What museums appear in the novel? Is Marlow’s craving for mystery ultimately satisfied by museums or by“the world,” and in what ways?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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A Maiden's Grave
Jeffrey Deaver, 1995
Penguin Group USA
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451204295
Summary
Eight vulnerable girls and their helpless teachers are forced off a school bus and held hostage. The madman who has them at gunpoint has a simple plan: one hostage an hour will die unless the demands are met.
Called to the scene is Arthur Potter, the FBI's best hostage negotiator. He has a plan. But so does one of the hostages—a beautiful teacher who's willing to do anything to save the lives of her students. Now, the clock is ticking as a chilling game of cat and mouse begins. (From the publisher.)
The 1997 HBO-TV film adaption of the novel, titled Dead Silence, stars James Garner and Marlee Matlin.
Author Bio
• Birth—May 6, 1950
• Where—Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Missouri; J.D., Fordham
University
• Awards—Nero Wolf Award; Steel Dager and Short Story
Dagger from Brittish Crime Writers' Assn.; Ellery Queen
Reader's Award for Best Short Story (3 times); Thumping
Good Read Award (British); Book of the Year by Mystery
Writers' Assn. of Japan; Grand Prix Award by Japanese
Adventure Fiction Assn.
• Currently—N/A
Jeffery Deaver is an American mystery/crime writer. He originally started working as a journalist, but trained as a lawyer and later practised law.
Many of Deaver's books tend to promote lateral thinking, particularly his short story collection Twisted. One of his books, The Blue Nowhere, features criminal hackers (one using social engineering to commit murder), as well as a law enforcement computer crime unit.
His most popular series features his regular character Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic detective, and Amelia Sachs. According to a 2006 interview on The Early Show, Deaver said he would rotate between his new series and Lincoln Rhyme each year. Virtually all of his works feature a trick ending, or sometimes multiple trick endings.
Deaver edited The Best American Mystery Stories 2009.
Two of Deaver's novels have been produced into films: The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie (in 1999), and A Maiden's Grave as the HBO film Dead Silence with James Garner and Marlee Matlin (in 1997).
Deaver also created the characters and—in a collaboration with 14 other noted writers—wrote the 17-part serial thriller The Chopin Manuscript narrated by Alfred Molina that was broadcast on Audible.com from September 25th to November 13, 2007.
Deaver was chosen as author of the newest James Bond novel (May, 2011), known as Project X, which is set in the present era and published in May of 2011. He is the second American author to write Bond novels, after Raymond Benson. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
It's said that great minds think alike; apparently great thriller writers do too. Here's the second outstanding novel in as many months to see a busload of schoolchildren kidnapped by maniacs. The first was Mary Willis Walker's Under the Beetle's Cellar (Forecasts, June 12); Deaver's is equally gripping, with the added twist that these kids are deaf. In rural Kansas, an act of kindness launches a nightmare when Mrs. Harstrawn, along with hearing-impaired apprentice teacher Melanie Charrol, stops her busload of deaf schoolgirls at a car wreck, only to be taken hostage by Lou Handy and two other stone-cold killers who've just escaped from prison. Pursued by a state trooper, the captors race with their prey to an abandoned slaughterhouse. There, Arthur Potter, the FBI's foremost hostage negotiator, sets up a command post-but the nightmare intensifies when Handy releases one girl, then shoots her in the back just as she reaches the agent. After further brutalities, Melanie decides to rescue her students herself, tricking the killers with sign language games to convey her plan to her charges. Meanwhile, pressure mounts on Potter as the media get pushy, the local FBI stonewalls, Kansas State hostage rescue units try an end run to grab the glory and an assistant attorney general butts in. Deaver (Praying for Sleep) brilliantly conveys the tensions and deceit of hostage negotiations; he also proves a champion of the deaf, offering poetic insight into their world. Throughout, heartbreakingly real characters keep the wildly swerving plot from going off-track, even during the multiple-whammy twists that bring the novel, Deaver's best to date, to its spectacular finish.
Publishers Weekly
A bus carrying eight deaf children and their teachers stops in the middle of the Kansas countryside, a car wreck directly ahead. Soon, three escaped killers rise out of the nearby cornfields and take children and teachers hostage. Pursued by the police, the convicts are forced to hole up in an abandoned slaughterhouse. There they threaten to shoot a child every hour until their demands are met. A 12-hour war of wits begins between FBI hostage expert Arthur Potter and the escapees' leader, Louis Jeremiah Handy. "I aim to get outta here. ...If it means I gotta shoot 'em dead as posts then that's the way it's gonna be," Handy boasts. Potter finds himself "in the middle of the week's media big bang," battling publicity-hungry politicians, trigger-happy cops, and the press as well as the unpredictable killers. This book by the best-selling author of Praying for Sleep (1994) starts with a bang, and the tension never lets up. A topnotch thriller with an unexpected kicker at the end. —David Keymer, California State Univ., Stanislaus
Library Journal
Eight students and two teachers from a school for the deaf are kidnapped on a remote Kansas highway by three murderous escaped convicts.... In Arthur Potter, [the author] introduces a sympathetic and human hero, a complex, moralistic man who can only succeed at his craft by befriending the vilest criminals and then betraying them. Deaver has also succeeded in making his deaf characters vivid individuals, without a hint of patronizing
Booklist
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 A Maiden's Grave:
1. Jeffrey Deaver did a great deal of research into the world of deaf people. How convincing is his treatment of their world? What most surprised...and/or impressed you by some of his revelations?
2. A strong bond exists among people in the deaf community, yet there are also serious divisions. Talk about that divisiveness. Whom do you side with?
3. Why might Deaver have chosen a slaughterhouse as the setting for A Maiden's Grave? What affect does it have on your reading of the novel?
4. Talk about the villains of the story, especially Lou Handy. How would you describe him? Is there anything to admire in him? What about his cohorts, Wilcox and Bonner?
5. Discuss the method of hostage negotiations portrayed in the book. What is the standard strategy?
6. Talk about Arthur Potter. What do you think of his character—and his technique as a hostage negotiator? Is he right to take the risks he does? Why does he refer to the hostages as nearly dead—to the situation as a homocide-in-progress? What about his befriending of Handy? Is he a moral man?
7. What do you think of Melanie Charrol and her efforts to avert disaster? How do she and Potter develop feelings for one another...when their only "contact" has been a single glimpse and a mouthed message?
8 What are your feelings toward the hostages, especially, say, Donna Hawstrawn, or Susan, Kielle and Shannon? Does Deaver do a good job of portraying frightened young girls? What about the decision to take matters into their own hands—how did you feel about that? And why do the girls repeat lines of the poem they were to deliver at the recital?
9. What are the conflicts of interest between the various factions of law enforcement officials, politicians, and media? In what ways do they actually endanger the girls' lives? Do you think Deaver has described their competing interests authentically?
10. What is the significance of the novel's title?
11. Does this book deliver in terms of suspense and excitement? Were you surprised by all the twists and turns—or did you find them predictable? How about Deaver's last minute roller coaster ride? Is the ending satisfying? And, finally, what about character development—does Deaver adequately develop his characters in a book dependent on plot?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Sentimentalists
Johanna Skibsrud, 2009
W.W. Norton & Co.
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393082517
Summary
Winner, 2010 Giller Prize
Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel connects the flooding of an Ontario town, the Vietnam War, a trailer in North Dakota and an unfinished boat in Maine. Parsing family history, worn childhood memories, and the palimpsest of old misunderstandings, Skibsrud's narrator maps her father's past.
Haunted by the vivid horrors of the Vietnam War, exhausted from years spent battling his memories, Napoleon Haskell leaves his North Dakota trailer and moves to Canada. He retreats to a small Ontario town where Henry, the father of his fallen Vietnam comrade, has a home on the shore of a man-made lake.
Under the water is the wreckage of what was once the town—and the home where Henry was raised. When Napoleon's daughter arrives, fleeing troubles of her own, she finds her father in the dark twilight of his life, and rapidly slipping into senility. With love and insatiable curiosity, she devotes herself to learning the truth about his life; and through the fog, Napoleon's past begins to emerge.
Lyrical and riveting, The Sentimentalists is a story of what lies beneath the surface of everyday life, and of the commanding power of the past. Johanna Skibsrud's first novel marks the debut of a powerful new voice in Canadian fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—Meadowville, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Toronto; M.A., Concordia
University; Ph.D. candidate, Universite de Montreal.
• Awards—Scotiabank Giller Prize
• Currently—Montreal, Quebec
Johanna Skibsrud is the author of The Sentimentalists, winner of the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. Her other books include the poetry collections Late Nights with Wild Cowboys (shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award) and I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being. She lives in Montreal.
Skibsrud's Giller win also focused attention on the struggles of small press publishers. The book had been originally published by Gaspereau Press, a boutique firm based in Nova Scotia which is one of Canada's only book publishing companies that still binds and prints its own books, with the result that the firm had difficulty meeting the increased demand after Skibsrud's win was announced. Chapters-Indigo, Canada's primary bookstore chain, did not have a single copy of the book in stock anywhere in Canada in the entire week of the Giller announcement.
However, the paper book's unavailability resulted in a significant increase in ebook sales; the ebook version of the novel quickly became the top-selling title for Kobo devices. The company subsequently announced that it had sold the novel's trade paperback rights to Douglas & McIntyre, while it will continue to print a smaller run of the novel's original edition for book collectors. W.W. Norton & Company is the book's U.S. publisher. (From the publishers and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(As of early 2011, this work has yet to be published in the U.S., so reviews are from Canada. We will add Publishers Weekly, et al, as those reviews become available.)
Skibsrud knows what she's doing: The slow fuse of the novel's first half turns out to be a very effective setup for the explosive second.
National Post (Canada)
A solid debut and a beautiful tribute to a father-daughter relationship.
Globe and Mail (Toronto)
I read it twice, and it’s amazing even the second time, and I think it would be even more amazing the third time. She’s a tremendous stylist.
Michael Enright - Sunday Edition (Canadian Broadcast Company)
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 Sentimentalists:
1. What is the meaning of the book's title?
2. One of Skibsrud's thematic concerns is the fragility and unreliability of memory. In what ways specifically, both large and small, does that theme play itself out in the novel? (Consider, for instance, the field glasses turned the wrong way around.)
3. Talk about the metaphor of Casablanca's having been flooded—and especially the canoe rides in which Henry and Napoleon's daughter skim over the place where Henry grew up.
4. What is Napoleon's relationship with his daughters? In what way has his war experience shaped his role as a father?
5. Discuss Napoleon's marriage and the narrator's mother with her depressive episodes.
6. Comment on Napoleon's statement, "Women think they can make sad things go away by knowing the reason that they happened." True, false, neither—not just the part about women, but also whether understanding why sad things happen is an antidote to sadness?
7. The Vietnam War is central to the second part of the book. What exactly happened during the war that has so deeply affected Napoleon? Is it possible to sort out the truth from all the conflicting accounts?
8. Does the narrator truly come to know her father at the end of his life...or by the end of this novel? What does she know, or understand, about him?
9. Johanna Skibsrud approaches the novel as a poet. Can you point to evidence of her poetry background in The Sentimentalists? Think about the rhythmic quality of her prose, her diction, the use of imagery and symbols.
10. How did you experience this book? Was it a difficult read for you? Did it hold your interest?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)
Nobody's Fool
Richard Russo, 1993
Knopf Doubleday
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679753339
Summary
In this slyly funny and moving novel, Russo follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat, upstate New York town—and in the lives of the unluckiest of its citizens. (From the publisher.)
More
Sully, a man who has never personally met with good luck, is in pain and jobless. He works, but gets paid under the table because his disability case has not yet come up in court. He deals with his ex-wife, his landlady, his soon to be ex-girlfriend, and his son while suffering his knee pain.
In this intricately woven novel, Russo allows readers to enjoy its humor while appreciating the stark realities of the lives that people it. While Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls (2001), many people still consider this to be their favorite of his works. (J.P. from AudioFile.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 15, 1949
• Where—Johnstown, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F. A. and Ph.D., University of Arizona
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Camden, Maine
Prizewinning author Richard Russo is regarded by many critics as the best writer about small-town America since Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. "He doesn't over-sentimentalize [small towns]," said Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air." Nor does he belittle the dreams and hardships of his working-class characters. "I come from a blue-collar family myself and I think he gets the class interactions; he just really nails class in his novels," said Corrigan.
When Russo left his own native small town in upstate New York, it was with hopes of becoming a college professor. But during his graduate studies, he began to have second thoughts about the academic life. While finishing up his doctorate, he took a creative writing class; and a new career path opened in front of him.
Russo's first novel set the tone for much of his later work. The story of an ailing industrial town and the interwoven lives of its inhabitants, Mohawk won critical praise for its witty, engaging style. In subsequent books, he has brought us a dazzling cast of characters, mostly working-class men and women who are struggling with the problems of everyday life (poor health, unemployment, mounting bills, failed marriages) in dilapidated, claustrophobic burghs that have—like their denizens—seen better days. In 2001, Russo received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, a brilliant, tragicomic set-piece that explores past and present relationships in a once-thriving Maine town whose textile mill and shirt factory have gone bust.
Russo's vision of America would be bleak, except for the wit and optimism he infuses into his stories. Even when his characters are less than lovable, they are funny, rueful, and unfailingly human. "There's a version of myself that I still see in a kind of alternative universe and it's some small town in upstate New York or someplace like that," Russo said in an interview. That ability to envision himself in the bars and diners of small-town America has served him well. "After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life," said the fiction writer Annie Proulx. "And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are."
Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
• In 1994, Russo's book Nobody's Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis. Newman also starred in the 1998 movie Twilight, for which Russo wrote the screenplay. Russo now divides his time between writing fiction and writing for the movies.
• When he wrote his first books, Russo was employed full-time as a college teacher and would stop at the local diner between classes to work on his novels. After the success of Nobody's Food (the book and movie), he was able to quit teaching—but he still likes to write in tight spots, such as the Camden Deli. It's "a less lonely way to write," he told USA Today. "I'm less self-conscious when it's not so quiet."
• When asked what his favorite books are, he offered this list:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens—All of Dickens, really. The breadth of his canvas, the importance he places on vivid minor characters, his understanding that comedy is serious business. And in the character of Pip, I learned, even before I understood I'd learned it, that we recognize ourselves in a character's weakness as much than his strength. When Pip is ashamed of Joe, the best man he knows, we see ourselves, and it's terrible, hard-won knowledge.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain—Twain's great novel demonstrates that you can go to the very darkest places if you're armed with a sense of humor. His study of American bigotry, ignorance, arrogance, and violence remains so fresh today, alas, because human nature remains pretty constant. I understand the contemporary controversy, of course. Huck's discovery that Jim is a man is hardly a blinding revelation to black readers, but the idea that much of what we've been taught by people in authority is a crock should resonate with everybody. Especially these days.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—Mostly, I suppose, because his concerns -- class, money, the invention of self -- are so central to the American experience. Fitzgerald understood that our most vivid dreams are often rooted in self-doubt and weakness. Many people imagine that we identify with strength and virtue. Fitzgerald knew better.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck—For the beauty of the book's omniscience. It's fine for writers to be humble. Most of us have a lot to be humble about. But it does you no good to be timid. Pretend to be God? Why not? (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Small towns, like seagoing vessels, have always suited fiction: manageable little pressure cookers with a fixed cast of characters, whose lack of privacy and enforced proximity may cause the plot to boil over.... One wants to congratulate Mr. Russo for what he avoids. Nobody's Fool never slides into the corn-pone hokiness so often found in novels of small-town life, fiction in which the rural setting is either a Walker Evans photo or Dogpatch. In these books, the characters talk as if they were auditioning for the Henry Fonda part in The Grapes of Wrath. But dialogue is what Mr. Russo does best, and the fun of this novel is in hearing these guys (and women) talk, giving one another a hard time— they're funny, quick and inventive.
Francine Prose - New York Time
Sully is reminiscent, in a way, of Bellow's old men.... One never tires of watching him, because he has the capacity to make everyone around him feel better, including the reader.
The New Yorker
Sixty-year-old Sully is "nobody's fool," except maybe his own. Out of work (undeclared-income work is what he does, when he can), down to his last few bucks, hampered by an arthritic broken knee, Sully is worried that he's started on a run of bad luck. And he has. The banker son of his octogenarian landlady wants him evicted; Sully's estranged son comes home for Thanksgiving only to have his wife split; Sully's own high-strung ex-wife seems headed for a nervous breakdown; and his longtime lover is blaming him for her daughter's winding up in the hospital with a busted jaw. But Sully's biggest problem is the memory of his own abusive father, a ghost who haunts his every day. As he demonstrated in Mohawk (Random, 1986) and The Risk Pool (Random, 1989), Russo knows the small towns of upstate New York and the people who inhabit them; he writes with humor and compassion. A delight. —Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, MA
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. This novel's title, Nobody's Fool, is a punning reference to its protagonist, Donald Sullivan, who at age 60 is "divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable—all of which he stubbornly confuse[s] with independence." Why is Sully so insistent on remaining nobody's fool? How has this determination affected his relationships with other people?
2. One consequence of Sully's prickly autonomy is his tendency to go off on "stupid streaks." Is Sully a stupid man? How would you evaluate a freedom whose defining characteristic seems to be the freedom to do the wrong thing at the wrong time?
3. From the beginning we know that Sully has a bad knee, and his refusal to treat—or even favor—it generates many of the novel's complications. In what ways does this injury resonate with the novel's theme.
4. Sully's string of misfortunes may also be due to bad luck or malign predestination. Is he destined to be unlucky? To what extent are his actions and character predetermined?
5. Sully's father brutalized him as a child. Sully deserted his son, Peter. Peter abandoned his timid eldest son, Will, to the mercies of his sociopathic little brother. What causes does the author posit for this four-generation history of cruelty and neglect?
6. Perhaps to compensate for Sully's brutal father, Russo supplies Sully with a very good, if somewhat sharp-tongued, surrogate mother, Beryl Peoples. She may, in fact, be the most real and enduring attachment Sully has. How does their relationship compare with Beryl's relationship with her real son, Clive, Jr.? How is the antagonism between Clive and Sully an extension of their childhood rivalry for the affections of Beryl's late husband?
7. How would you characterize Russo's portrayal of relations between the sexes, and why are most of his characters divorced, widowed, or unhappily married?
8. The sudden flashes of good luck (or simple happiness) that illuminate Sully's life and the lives of other characters may be attributable to grace, which The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines as "the influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them." At what moments does grace seem to operate in this novel?
9. Nobody's Fool is also a novel about a town, North Bath, New York, whose misfortunes, like Sully's, may be due to collective stupidity or fate. Even North Bath's venerable elms now constitute a threat to its communal life and property. In what ways do the novel's principal locales—Hattie's, the OTB, and the White Horse-—function as a microcosm of the town as a whole? To what extent are North Bath's decline and grandiose visions of renewal symptomatic of the political and economic climate of America in the 1980s?
10. What role does class play in this novel? To what extent are its characters shaped by economic circumstances?
11. One critic has described Nobody's Fool as "a sad novel camouflaged in comedy." How is this true? What is the nature of the book's sadness? How does Russo balance his comic and tragic impulses?
(Questions issued by publisher.)