Midwives 
Chris Bohjalian, 1998
Random House
372 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375706776


Summary
In the pastoral community of Reddington, Vermont, during the harsh winter of 1981, Sibyl Danforth makes a life-or-death decision based on fifteen years of experience as a respected midwife—a decision intended to save a child, a decision that will change her life forever.

In the midst of a brutally cold night, cut off from the area hospital and even from the rescue squad by an ice storm that has downed phone lines and made roads impassable, Sibyl Danforth feels she has no alternative except to attempt to save the baby of a woman in her care who she fears has died of a stroke during a long and difficult labor.

Later that day, however, the midwife's assistant tells the police that she believes the mother was still very much alive when the cesarean section was performed in the cold and isolated farmhouse.

The story of this tragedy and its aftermath is narrated by Sibyl's daughter, Connie, now an obstetrician, who is remembering the events that occurred the year she turned fourteen, when her mother's freedom and her family's fate rested in the hands of twelve men and women. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—White Plains, New York, USA
• Education—Amherst College
• Awards—Anahid Literary Award, 2000; New England Book Award, 2002
• Currently—lives in Lincoln, Vermont

Christopher Aram Bohjalian, who goes by the pen name Chris Bohjalian, is an American novelist. Bohjalian is the author of 15 novels, including New York Times bestsellers Midwives, Secrets of Eden, The Law of Similars, Before You Know Kindness, The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and The Night Strangers.

Bohjalian is the son of Aram Bohjalian, who was a senior vice president of the New York advertising agency Romann & Tannenholz. Chris Bohjalian graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an account representative for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York.

He and his wife lived in a co-op in Brooklyn until March 1986, when the two were riding in a taxicab in which the driver refused to let them out of the car for 45 minutes, ignoring all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight, the driver dropped them off at a near-deserted street in front of a crack house, where the police were conducting a raid and Bohjalian and his wife were forced to drop to the ground for their protection. The incident prompted the couple to move from Brooklyn; Bohjalian said, "After it was all over, we just thought, "Why do we live here?" A few days later, the couple read an ad in The New York Times referencing the "People's Republic of Vermont," and in 1987 the couple moved to Lincoln, Vermont.

Early career
After buying their house, Bohjalian began writing weekly columns for local newspaper and magazine about living in the small town, which had a population of about 975 residents. The Concord Monitor said of Bohjalian during this period, "his immersion in community life and family, Vermont-style, has allowed him to develop into a novelist with an ear and empathy for the common man." Bohjalian continued the column for about 12 years, writing about such topics as his own daily life, fatherhood and the transformation of America. The column has run in the Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.

Bohjalian's first novel, A Killing in the Real World, was released in 1988. Almost two decades after it was released, Bohjalian said of the book, "It was a train wreck. I hadn't figured things out yet." His third novel, Past the Bleachers, was released in 1992 and adapted as a Hallmark Channel television movie in 1995.

In 1998, Bohjalian wrote his fifth book, Midwives, a novel focusing on rural Vermont midwife Sibyl Danforth, who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after one of her patients died following an emergency Caesarean section. The novel was critically acclaimed and was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the October 1998 selection of her Oprah's Book Club, which helped push the book to great financial success. It became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Victoria Blewer has often described her husband as having "a crush" on the Sybil Danforth character. In 2001, the novel was adapted into a Lifetime Movie Network television film starring Sissy Spacek in the lead role. Spacek said the Danforth character appealed to her because "the heart of the story is my character's inner struggle with self-doubt, the solo road you travel when you have a secret."

Later career
Bohjalian followed Midwives with the 1999 novel The Law of Similars, about a widower attorney suffering from nameless anxieties who starts dating a woman who practices alternative medicine. The novel was inspired by Bohjalian's real-life visit to a homeopath in an attempt to cure frequent colds he was catching from his daughter's day care center. Bohjalian said of the visit, "I don't think I imagined there was a novel in homeopathy, however, until I met the homeopath and she explained to me the protocols of healing. There was a poetry to the language that a patient doesn't hear when visiting a conventional doctor." The protagonist, a father, is based in part on Bohjalian himself, and his four-year-old daughter is based largely on Bohjalian's daughter, who was three when he was writing the book., Liz Rosenberg of The New York Times said the novel shared many similarities with Midwives but that it paled in comparison; Rosenberg said, "Unlike its predecessor, it fails to take advantage of Bohjalian's great gift for creating thoughtful fiction featuring characters in whom the reader sustains a lively interest." Megan Harlan of The Boston Phoenix described it as "formulaic fiction" and said Bohjalian focused too much on creating a complex plot and not enough of complex characterizations. The Law of Similars, like Midwives, made the New York Times bestsellers list.

He won the New England Book Award in 2002, and in 2007 released "The Double Bind," a novel based on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

In 2008, Bohjalian released Skeletons at the Feast, a love story set in the last six months of World War II in Poland and Germany. The novel was inspired by an unpublished diary written by German citizen Eva Henatsch from 1920 to 1945. The diary was given to Bohjalian in 1998 by Henatsch's grandson Gerd Krahn, a friend of Bohjalian, who had a daughter in the same kindergarten class as Bohjalian's daughter. Bohjalian was particularly fascinated by Henatsch's account of her family's trek west ahead of the Soviet Army, but he was not inspired to write a novel from it until 2006, when he read Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, Max Hastings' history of the final years of World War II. Bohjalian was struck not only by how often Henatsch's story mirrored real-life experiences, but also the common "moments of idiosyncratic human connection" found in both. Skeletons of the Feast was considered a departure for Bohjalian because it was not only set outside of Vermont, but set in a particular historical moment.

His 2010 novel, Secrets of Eden, was also a critical success, receiving starred reviews from three of the four trade journals (Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly), as well as many newspapers and magazines. It debuted at # 6 on The New York Times bestseller list.

His next novel, The Night Strangers, published in 2011, represents yet another departure for Bohjalian. The is both a gothic ghost story and a taut psychological thriller.

He has written a weekly column for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since February 1992 called "Idyll Banter." His 1,000th column appeared in May 2011.

Personal comments
In a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview, Bohjalian offered up these personal comments:

I was the heaviest child, by far, in my second-grade class. My mother had to buy my pants for me at a store called the "Husky Boys Shop," and still she had to hem the cuffs up around my knees. I hope this experience, traumatizing as it was, made me at least marginally more sensitive to people around me.

I have a friend with Down syndrome, a teenage boy who is capable of remembering the librettos from entire musicals the first or second time he hears them. The two of us belt them out together whenever we're driving anywhere in a car.I am a pretty avid bicyclist. The other day I was biking alone on a thin path in the woods near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and suddenly before me I saw three bears. At first I saw only two, and initially I thought they were cats. Then I thought they were dogs. Finally, just as I was approaching them and they started to scurry off the path and into the thick brush, I understood they were bears. Bear cubs, to be precise. Which is exactly when their mother, no more than five or six feet to my left, reared up on her hind legs, her very furry paws and very sharp claws raised above her head in a gesture that an optimist might consider a wave and guy on a bike might consider something a tad more threatening. Because she was standing on a slight incline, I was eye level with her stomach—an eventual destination that seemed frighteningly plausible. I have never biked so fast in my life in the woods. I may never have biked so fast in my life on a paved road.

I do have hobbies—I garden and bike, for example—but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Vermont, where he is active in the local church and the Vermont theater community—always off-stage, never on.

Writing style
Bohjalian novels often focus on a specific issue, such as homelessness, animal rights and environmentalism, and tend to be character-driven, revolving around complex and flawed protagonists and secondary characters. Bohjalian uses characteristics from his real life in his writings; in particular, many of his novels take place in fictional Vermont towns, and the names of real New Hampshire towns are often used throughout his stories. Bohjalian said, "Writers can talk with agonizing hubris about finding their voices, but for me, it was in Vermont that I discovered issues, things that matter to me." His novels also tend to center around ordinary people facing extraordinarily difficult situations resulting from unforeseen circumstances, often triggered by other parties. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Superbly crafted...powerful. It will thrill readers who cherish their worn copies of To Kill a Mockingbird.
People

Among the many achievements of this gripping, insightful novel is the remarkable fullness with which Bohjalian (Water Witches) writes about both the physicality and the spirituality of childbirth.

OB/GYN physician Connie Danforth looks back on the events of a wrenching summer when she was 14 and her mother, Sibyl, a Vermont midwife and ex-hippie with a "distaste for most traditional and institutional authority," was on trial for murder. Sybil has successfully home-delivered more than 500 babies, but one freezing March night, the phone line down and the roads impassable, the laboring woman she is attending suddenly suffers what appears to be a fatal stroke. Sibyl saves the child with an emergency C-section only to find herself arrested after her assistant tells police that the operation was performed on a still-living woman. Is there, in fact, blood on Sibyl's hands? Or is she just a target of the hostile New England medical community, whose persecution of midwives dates back to the 17th-century expulsion of Anne Hutchinson from the Massachusetts Bay? As Connie wrestles with increasing doubts about whether or not her mother acted correctly, the Danforth family struggles to remain intact in the face of community ostracism and unrelenting media scrutiny.

Readers will find themselves mesmerized by the irresistible momentum of the narrative and by Bohjalian's graceful and lucid, irony-laced prose. His warm, vivid evocations of child-bearing capture the wonder and terror of bringing a baby into the world. With acutely sensitive character delineation, he manages to present all the participants in this drama, from the family members to the grieving widower, as complex, fully realized individuals. This is a story with no obvious villains or heroes, which only renders the tragedy all the more haunting.
Publishers Weekly

Bohjalian (Water Witches, 1995, etc.) blends some provocative moral, medical, and political issues into a classic coming-of-age story in this To Kill a Mockingbird-like reminiscence of the murder trial of a midwife, as witnessed by her teenaged daughter.

From the day back in the '60s when Sibyl Danforth stepped forward in an emergency to help a pregnant friend give birth, she fell in love with the birthing process and dedicated herself to a calling as a lay midwife in rural Vermont. But as her obstetrician daughter, Connie, points out, Sibyl never bothered to obtain certification from the American College of Nurse-Midwives. Still, neighbors who wanted to have their babies at home felt comfortable calling on her. Among Sibyl's patients in 1981, the year Connie turned 14, was a minister's wife named Charlotte Bedford, a fragile woman whose incredibly difficult labor led to a stroke and what appeared to be Charlotte's death. Prevented by a heavy snowstorm from getting Charlotte to a hospital, Sibyl frantically tried to save the baby's life by performing an emergency cesarean on the presumably dead woman. Only after Charlotte is carted away does the question arise: Was the woman actually dead when Sibyl cut her open? In a strong, ruminative voice, Connie re-creates that terrible year when the state's attorney, Charlotte Bedford's family, the local medical community, and even members of the Danforths' small hometown seemed to conspire to put not just Sibyl but the entire practice of home birthing on trial. Connie, fearing witch-huntstyle reprisals, eventually broke the law to protect her beloved mother's freedom. But the question remains: Did Sibyl kill Charlotte for the sake of her baby?

Rich in moral ambiguity, informative to a fault on the methods and politics of childbirth, and perceptive regarding the whipsawing desires and loyalties of a perfectly normal teenaged girl: a compelling, complex novel and the strongest yet from the talented Bohjalian.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. By the time Sibyl was of college age, her daughter says, "She had already developed what was then a popular distaste for most traditional or institutional authority" [p. 31]. How does Sibyl continue to maintain an "anti-establishment" stance throughout her life? How does the legacy of the sixties continue to shape the lives, and the self-images, of Sibyl, Rand, and Stephen?

2. "My mother never came quickly or lightly to the decision that one of her patients should go to a hospital" [p. 62]. Why not? What does the act of home birth symbolize for Sibyl, her patients, and the other midwives?

3. Does Anne Austin do the right thing by calling Dr. Hewitt, or does she act out of hostility towards Sibyl? Why doesn't she call Sibyl before talking to the doctor? Should she have done so?

4. Sibyl notes that bankers, lawyers, doctors, and architects choose to have babies at the hospital rather than at home. What point is she trying to make?

5. Tom compares doctors with "pack animals" [p. 95]. Stephen, at the trial, says, "The whole idea that a midwife can do what they do—and do it better—drives some of them crazy, and so they're persecuting my client" [p. 232]. Are these accusations fair, or unfair, to doctors?

6. After Charlotte's death, Tom says to Connie, "So, they're going to have to blame someone" [p. 101]. Do you think this is true? Is Sibyl blamed because people must blame someone? Should someone be held accountable for every death of this sort, or can some be simply attributed to tragic accident?

7. Sibyl carries Pitocin and Ergotrate in case of emergencies during labor. For a lay practitioner to do so is illegal, "but," as Connie states, "every midwife carried them. My mother wasn't unique" [p. 64]. How does this affect midwifery's position as a natural way of delivery? Does the fact that every midwife does so make it all right, or should use of these drugs be limited, as the law prescribes, to licensed doctors and nurses?

8. How alike, basically, are Rand and Sibyl? Has Rand changed more or less than Sibyl from their hippie days? How compatible is he with Sibyl and what she stands for? Do you see their marriage as essentially happy?

9. Do you think that the relationship that develops between Sibyl and Stephen is simply a flirtation, or is it more than a flirtation? What role do Rand's behavior and attitude during the trial play in fostering this relationship?

10. Some of the male and female reporters who cover Sibyl's trial try to avert their eyes from the breasts of the many nursing mothers in the courtroom [p. 213]. Does this reflect to you an essential discomfort with the human body in our culture? Might such a discomfort explain society's disapproval of people like Sibyl Danforth?

11. In the final analysis, do you think that Sibyl behaves irresponsibly during Veil Bedford's birth? Should she, as the prosecution claims, have been more alert to potential weather problems and to Charlotte's health history? Is she precipitate in performing the cesarean section without checking Charlotte's life signs a final time after Asa and Anne returned with the knife, or is it imperative that she rush in order to save the child's life?

12. Do you believe that Connie makes the right choice in shielding her mother from the law? "My mother's conviction would not bring back Charlotte Bedford. It would merely destroy a second woman," Connie reflects [p. 295]. What about the principle involved? Should Sibyl in fact have been allowed to continue to practice as a midwife?

13. "My choice of profession was neither an indictment of my mother's profession nor a slap at her persecutors," says Connie [p. 143]. Is this true? What does Connie mean when she says that "atonement," "reparation," "compensation," and "justice" entered into her decision to become an obstetrician [p. 303]?

14. Did Sibyl's final diary entry [pp. 309-310] change any of the opinions you formed during the course of reading about the trial? If you had any firm ideas about home versus hospital birth, have they been changed by reading this book? Do you think that lay midwives should be allowed to practice? Would you trust yourself to the care of a midwife, or would you go to a hospital for delivery by a doctor?

15. Connie quotes physicians as saying: "But we've lost our collective memory of the fact that although labor is natural, it's dangerous. Let's face it, there was a time when women and babies died all the time in labor.... A hospital is like an infant car seat: If something unexpected should occur and there's some kind of collision, we have the tools to pull the baby out of the oven" [p. 18]. The midwives argue: "What's the price of attempting to eliminate chance, or trying to better the odds? A sterile little world with bright hospital lights?" [p. 123]. By which of the two points of view do you find yourself persuaded?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Shutter Island 
Dennis Lehane, 2003
HarperCollins
299 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061703256


Summary 
The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple-murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance.

As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades—with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—August 4, 1965
• Where—Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Eckerd College; M.F.A., Florida International University
• Awards—Shamus Award, Best First Novel; Anthony Award; Dilys Award
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts


Dennis Lehane is an American author. He has written several award-winning novels, including A Drink Before the War and the New York Times bestseller Mystic River, which was later made into an Academy Award-winning film.

Another novel, Gone, Baby, Gone, was also adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. His novel Shutter Island was adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2010. Lehane is a graduate of Florida International University in Miami, Florida.

Personal Life
Lehane was born and reared in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, and continues to live in the Boston area, which provides the setting for most of his books. He spent summers on Fieldston Beach in Marshfield. Lehane is the youngest of five children. His father was a foreman for Sears & Roebuck, and his mother worked in a Boston public school cafeteria. Both of his parents emigrated from Ireland. His brother, Gerry Lehane, who is two and a half years older than Dennis, is a veteran actor who trained at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence before heading to New York in 1990. Gerry is currently a member of the Invisible City Theatre Company.

He was previously married to Sheila Lawn, formerly an advocate for the elderly for the city of Boston but now working with the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office as an Assistant District Attorney. Currently, he is married to Dr. Angela Bernardo, with whom he has one daughter.

He is a graduate of Boston College High School (a Boston Jesuit prep school), Eckerd College (where he found his passion for writing), and the graduate program in creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. He occasionally makes guest appearances as himself in the ABC comedy/drama TV series Castle.

Literary Career
His first book, A Drink Before the War, which introduced the recurring characters Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, won the 1995 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel. The fourth book in the series, Gone, Baby, Gone, was adapted to a film of the same title in 2007; it was directed by Ben Affleck and starred Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan as Kenzie and Gennaro. Reportedly, Lehane "has never wanted to write the screenplays for the films [based on his own books], because he says he has 'no desire to operate on my own child.'"

Lehane's Mystic River was made into a film in 2003; directed by Clint Eastwood, it starred Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon. The novel itself was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction, and France's Prix Mystère de la Critique.

Lehane's first play, Coronado, debuted in New York in December 2005. Coronado is based on his acclaimed short story "Until Gwen," which was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly and was selected for both The Best American Short Stories and The Best Mystery Short Stories of 2005.

Lehane described working on his historical novel, The Given Day, as "a five- or six-year project" with the novel beginning in 1918 and encompassing the 1919 Boston Police Strike and its aftermath. The novel was published in October, 2008.

On October 22, 2007 Paramount Pictures announced that they had optioned Shutter Island with Martin Scorsese attached as director. The Laeta Kalogridis-scripted adaptation has Leonardo DiCaprio playing U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, "who is investigating the disappearance of a murderess who escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane and is presumed to be hiding on the remote Shutter Island." Mark Ruffalo played opposite DiCaprio as U.S. Marshal Chuck Aule. Shutter Island was released on February 19, 2010.

Teaching Career
Since becoming a literary success after the broad appeal of his Kenzie and Gennaro novels, as well as the success of Mystic River, Lehane has taught at several colleges. He taught fiction writing and serves as a member of the board of directors for a low-residency MFA program sponsored by Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. He has also been involved with the Solstice Summer Writers' Conference at Boston's Pine Manor College and taught advanced fiction writing at Harvard University, where his classes quickly filled up.

In May 2005, Lehane was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Eckerd College and was appointed to Eckerd's Board of Trustees later that year. In Spring 2009, Lehane became a Joseph E. Connor Award recipient and honorary brother of Phi Alpha Tau professional fraternity at Emerson College in Boston, MA. Other brothers and Connor Award recipients include Robert Frost, Elia Kazan, Jack Lemmon, Red Skelton, Edward R. Murrow, Yul Brynner, and Walter Cronkite. Also in Spring 2009, Lehane presented the commencement speech at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, and was awarded an honorary degree.

Film Career
Lehane wrote and directed an independent film called Neighborhoods in the mid 1990s. He joined the writing staff of the HBO drama series The Wire in 2004. Lehane returned as a writer for the fourth season in 2006 Lehane and the writing staff won the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony and the 2007 Edgar Award for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay for their work on the fourth season. Lehane remained a writer for the fifth and final season in 2008. Lehane and the writing staff were nominated for the WGA Award award for Best Dramatic Series again at the February 2009 ceremony.He served as an executive producer for Shutter Island. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Bibliography
The Kenzie-Gennaro Novels
1994 - A Drink Before the War
1996 - Darkness, Take My Hand
1997 - Sacred
1998 - Gone, Baby, Gone
1999 - Prayers for Rain
2010 - Moonlight Mile

Joe Coughlin Novels
2008 - The Given Day
2012 - Live by Night
2015 - World Gone By

Stand-alones
2001 - Mystic River
2003 - Shutter Island
2006 - Coronado

Book Reviews 
Dennis Lehane takes a leap into unknown genre territory in Shutter Island. But whichever genre he's aiming for in this misguided effort—psychological suspense, cold war thriller or Grand Guignol melodrama—he misses it by a nautical mile.... The atmosphere is properly dark and moody, and so long as Teddy and Chuck stick to the manhunt and their investigation of Ashecliffe's creepy medical staff, they play their roles with muscle and grace.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times

To read Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island is to enter a nightmare of madness, violence and deception. To finish the novel—and it would be criminal even to hint at its ending—is to be disoriented, perhaps angered, and finally to reflect on the ability of a master storyteller to play havoc with our minds. If we could bring back Edgar Allan Poe and equip him with today's postmodern bag of tricks, he might give us a tale as unexpected and unsettling as Shutter Island.
Patrick Anderson - Washington Post

Shutter Island is a tremendously satisfying thriller. The suspense is molasses-thick with a plot that will keep you guessing. Lehane doesn't miss a trick. It's a great, fun read, and then there's that ending. You're sure to talk about this one over lunch.
Tom Walker - Denver Post

It has the headlong suspense and whopper of a story you would expect in any well-made thriller.
Joseph Barbato - USA Today

(Audio version.) Boston-area novelist Lehane has written a terrific suspense novel, an impressive follow-up to 2001's Mystic River. Shutter Island is off Massachusetts's coast, an army facility turned hospital for the criminally insane. When a beautiful-and certifiably crazy-patient escapes, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, are called in to investigate. Embroiled in uncertainties and mystery, the two soon learn there's much more at stake than simply finding one missing woman. Stechschulte gives a stirring performance. His portrayal of Daniels is convincing, and he reads the role with equal parts poignancy and toughness. Stechschulte is particularly adept at reading dialogue. For example, one stormy night at the hospital, Teddy and Chuck are playing cards with two of the hospital's workers. The quartet banters, calling each other's bluffs and having a grand old time, yet tones of racism underlie the conversation. Stechschulte handles the dialogue well, distinguishing between each voice and varying the pace between rapid back-and-forth and thoughtful, drawn out remarks.
Publishers Weekly

A pair of US Marshals are sent to an island-bound institution for the criminally insane to find an escaped murderer—in Lehane ’s lollapalooza of a corkscrew thriller. The Cold War is simmering and a hurricane approaching the Massachusetts coast when Edward Daniels and Charles Aule, his new partner, arrive at Ashecliffe Hospital in 1954, the morning after Rachel Solando, a housewife who drowned her three children, has gone AWOL. How did she get out of the third-floor room she’d been locked into two hours earlier without disturbing the door or windows or any of the three orderlies between her and the outdoors? Other false notes seem even more disturbing. Rachel has left behind a series of tantalizingly cryptic clues as to her fate. Chief of staff Dr. John Cawley, Rachel’s psychiatrist, refuses to share his notes on her, his personnel files, or the treatment files of Dr. Lester Sheehan, her group therapist, who left for his vacation on the ferry that brought Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule to the island. And the two marshals have brought baggage of their own: Teddy’s hunt for an arsonist he’s convinced is an Ashecliffe inmate and Chuck’s suspicion that the patients are being used as guinea pigs for some villainous new psychotropics. Inevitably, the hunters become the hunted, dissatisfied with reports that Rachel Solando has returned, determined to get to the bottom of the mind-altering experiments being carried out in the dread Lighthouse, separated from each other by natural and human assaults, and sought far more urgently by the ultra-secretive authorities than the woman they came to find. Will Cawley and company succeed in having them declared incompetent and preventing them from escaping? After an extraordinarily humane series of neo-noirs (Mystic River, 2001, etc.), Lehane has produced a brilliantly far-fetched page-turner that’s sure to be the most talked-about thriller of the year. 
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 Shutter Island:

1. Both Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule arrive at Ashecliffe with different motives than their official one, which is to find a missing patient. What are their underlying reasons in coming the the asylum?

2 How would you describe the two men, Teddy in particular? What are his traits? What "baggage" do both men bring into the investigation? In other words, what are their background stories? And how do personal issues affect their professional work?

3. What traits in Chuck does Teddy find unsettling?

4. Water plays an important role in this mystery-thriller. Explore its various incarnations and how it affects Teddy's psyche, as well as the setting and mood of the novel. Start, perhaps, with young Teddy's experience on his father's fishing boat.

5. What were your reactions to the hospital's medical director, Dr. Joseph Cawley? In what way does he appear suspicious, even perhaps unethical? What is Cawley's method for treating mental patients, and how does it square with the prevailing treatment of the 1950's?

6. How does Lehane make use of Teddy's psychic state to create tension and uncertainty and to drive the plot?

7. Comment on the passages in which Teddy recalls his love for Dolores, his wife. How does he describe his feelings for her?

8. The story takes place in 1954, during the Cold War. Why might Lehane have used that time period in which to set a story about madness, scientific experimentation, and life-threatening weather? What are the symbolic implications of the setting?

9. The plot of Shutter Island is filled with cryptic clues, twists, turns, and complications. Looking back, at what point were you thrown off track? Was there any point when you began to fit pieces of the puzzle together? Or were you mystified from start to finish?

10. What was your experience reading this book? Was it difficult to put down? Were you on the edge of your seat? Does Shutter Island deliver—does it live up to its reputation as a mystery-thriller? . . . Or did you find the story predictable and/or manipulative?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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You Remind Me of Me
Dan Chaon, 2004
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345441409


In Brief 
With his critically acclaimed Among the Missing and Fitting Ends, award-winning author Dan Chaon proved himself a master of the short story form. He is a writer, observes the Chicago Tribune, who can "convincingly squeeze whole lives into a mere twenty pages or so." Now Chaon marshals his notable talents in his much-anticipated debut novel.

You Remind Me of Me begins with a series of separate incidents: In 1977, a little boy is savagely attacked by his mother's pet Doberman; in 1997 another little boy disappears from his grandmother's backyard on a sunny summer morning; in 1966, a pregnant teenager admits herself to a maternity home, with the intention of giving her child up for adoption; in 1991, a young man drifts toward a career as a drug dealer, even as he hopes for something better.

With penetrating insight and a deep devotion to his characters, Dan Chaon explores the secret connections that irrevocably link them. In the process he examines questions of identity, fate, and circumstance: Why do we become the people that we become? How do we end up stuck in lives that we never wanted? And can we change the course of what seems inevitable?

In language that is both unflinching and exquisite, Chaon moves deftly between the past and the present in the small-town prairie Midwest and shows us the extraordinary lives of "ordinary" people. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1946 
• Raised—Sidney, Nebraska, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Syracuse University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; O'Henry Award; Academy Award in
  Literature-The American Academy of Arts & Letters
• Currently—lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, USA

Dan Chaon (pronounced "Shawn") is the acclaimed author of Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award, which was also listed as one of the ten best books of the year by the American Library Association, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as being cited as a New York Times Notable Book.

Chaon’s fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and won both Pushcart and O. Henry awards. Chaon teaches at Oberlin College and lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, with his wife and two sons. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
You Remind Me of Me is the first novel by an author already established for mournful, eloquent short stories with a tone reminiscent of Russell Banks's. Mr. Chaon's stories have been about emotional ellipses in his characters' lonely lives. (His collection Among the Missing was a nominee for the National Book Award.) In the same manner the new book is a peculiarly haunting work, since it has as much to do with what is absent from its characters' stories as with what is present. So Jonah grows up to be an uneasy loner, and he clings to the sense that his life could have been different if one important loss had never occurred. He knows exactly what that loss is.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

Three lives viewed through a kaleidoscope of memories and secret pain assume a kind of mythical dimension in Chaon's piercingly poignant tale of fate, chance and search for redemption. As he demonstrated in his short story collection Among the Missing, Chaon has a sensitive radar for the daily routines of people striving to escape the margins of poverty and establish meaningful lives. Here, a woman's unsuccessful effort to rise above the pain of giving away an illegitimate baby, and to fight against mental illness and offer love to a second child, blights all their lives. Living with his harsh and bitter mother, Norma, and his kindly grandfather in Little Bow, S.Dak., young Jonah Doyle is permanently scarred after the family's Doberman attacks and maims him. The resulting livid ridges on his face are the outward manifestations of a deeper wound that will always haunt him. After his mother's suicide, Jonah sets out to find the older brother he has never met, and in the process, brings them both to the verge of tragedy. Jonah's older sibling is Troy Timmens, a well-meaning bartender and sometime drug dealer in St. Bonaventure, Nebr., who is devoted to his six-year-old son, Loomis. The boy will play a pivotal part in Jonah's quixotic attempts to win Troy's love. Chaon structures his plot in alternating flashbacks, and the fragmentary time structure forces the reader to puzzle out the relationships and contributes to rising dramatic tension. Chaon's clarity of observation, expressed in restrained, nuanced prose, coupled with his compassion for his flawed characters, creates a heart-wrenching story of people searching for connection. Readers of Kent Haruf will find similarities here, in the settings in small towns on the Great Plains and in the dignified portrayal of people leading secret, stoic lives.
Publishers Weekly

In his masterly first novel, Chaon tells an absorbing tale of fate and the struggle for recovery and human connection. His greatest strength is the ability to intertwine multiple stories while neatly showcasing the tangled threads of each character. In one thread, a young boy named Jonah is brutally attacked and permanently scarred by his grandfather's Doberman pinscher; in another, Norma, Jonah's mentally ill mother, recalls entering a home for unwed mothers, where she prepared to give up her first child for adoption. That brings us to said child, Troy Timmens, a small-time drug dealer and bartender with a son of his own, Loomis. Jonah seeks out his older brother, who desperately wants more out of life, but their connection ends in disaster. Chaon, whose short story collection, Among the Missing, drew rave reviews, allows his characters to enact their lives, losses, and hopes in a stark and realistic manner. Readers who prefer expertly crafted plotting and strong characterization will be drawn to this novel. Highly recommended for public library systems with an emphasis on literary fiction and for anyone interested in promising first novelists. —Christopher J. Korenowsky, Columbus Metropolitan Lib. Syst., OH
Library Journal

(Adult/High School.) This first novel focuses on the disparate lives of a fragmented family as they struggle with the harsh realities of poverty, depression, and dysfunction. The story opens with Jonah, a troubled, self-involved boy in a small South Dakota town. Raised by a depressed and suicidal mother who never wanted him, he survives an attack from the family's Doberman only to be severely scarred on his face and hands. Jonah develops into a lonely and isolated man who tries to make connections with anyone willing to befriend him, only to push others away by eventually demanding more than they want to give. Driven by his need for acceptance, Jonah seeks out an older half brother who was given up for adoption at birth. Troy, a bartender and occasional marijuana dealer, has difficulties of his own: shortly after the disappearance of his wife, he is arrested and placed on probation and house arrest for drug dealing. He struggles to regain custody of his son, Loomis, a strangely intelligent and watchful boy, from his uncooperative mother-in-law and has little time for the hopeful Jonah. In what he intends as a gesture of brotherly friendship, Jonah kidnaps Loomis, meaning to take the boy to Troy. This desperate act ultimately leads to the dramatic yet real conclusion. A series of tightly interwoven flashbacks; deft handling of structure; and simple, precise language transform these characters' lives into a story that is highly readable, thought-provoking, and profoundly moving. —Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
School Library Journal

Acclaimed storywriter Chaon (Among the Missing, 2001, etc.) affirms his matchless skill in crafting the small sketch, even as he struggles to conclude the weather-beaten plot of his first novel with large-scale grace. The initial handful of chapters here, in fact, read like a fresh collection of stories, distinguished as usual by the shy, cutting honesty of Chaon's prose. As these precisely dated chapters collect, the larger design of the whole emerges. Jonah and Troy share a mother. Troy was adopted out, while Jonah was raised by his mother and grandfather. Nearly all the characters here are adopted, in one way or another, some more than once. While his legal parents shred apart the last tendrils of their marriage, Troy is taken into a young family's circle. Jonah lives with his mother, herself an orphan, her wifeless father, and a Doberman pinscher. Each incident is expertly delineated as the narrative gathers momentum: Troy's early experiences with soft drugs and girls, Jonah's mauling by his grandfather's Doberman, and their mother's yearlong stay at a home for unwed mothers. When Jonah sets out to find the brother he's heard his mother mention, Chaon's taut mastery slackens. Hiring on as a cook where his half-brother works, Jonah learns that Troy, recently arrested for marijuana possession, has lost custody of his son Loomis. The tightly wound Jonah improbably attempts to "rescue" the boy back into Troy's custody, even as Troy continues to struggle with the new knowledge that he has a long-lost brother. The symmetries and compensations here are a bit too tidy, and though his final vignette leaves the reader astonished once again, the larger satisfactions of mature plot-making remain elusive for this powerful, promising writer.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why did Nora give up her first baby and not her second? In turn, how did each child pay the price of her decision?

2. How do Jonah’s scars influence his life the most?

3. Why is Jonah so much more interested in the baby his mother gave up than Troy is about being adopted?

4. How do you feel Jonah and Troy’s lives would have been different if Nora had been honest with Wayne Hill, Troy’s natural father, about being pregnant?

5. How are Steve and Holiday, and Jonah important to each other? Why did their relationship end?

6. Why couldn’t Jonah recognize the circumstances he could change/influence so his fate would turn out differently?

7. How would Jonah and Troy’s lives been different if Jonah had been honest with Troy about their connection when they first met?

8. Why do you think Jonah didn’t tell Troy the truth about Nora’s life and personality when they first meet? Would this have changed the relationship between Troy and Jonah?

9. At what point did you recognize that Jonah has seriously broken with reality?

10. What is the significance of names in this novel? Why do you think the author chose each name?

Troy
The Mrs. Glass House
Jonah
Gary Gray
Mrs. Keene
Lisa Fixx
Loomis
St. Bonaventure

(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Wake of Forgiveness
Bruce Machart, 2010
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547521947

Summary
Bruce Machart tells an epic story of a Texas family at the turn of the twentieth century: a family of men led by a father, emotionally crippled following the death of his wife while in childbirth with their fourth boy, Karel.

From an early age, Karel proves so talented on horseback that his father enlists him to ride in acreage-staked horseraces against his neighbors, culminating in the ultimate high-stakes race against a powerful Spanish patriarch and his alluring daughters. Hanging in the balance are his father’s fortune, his brothers’ futures, and his own fate. Fourteen years later, with the stake of the race still driven hard between him and his brothers, Karel is finally forced to dress the wounds of his past and salvage the tattered fabric of his family.

With rich descriptive language and a cadence as deliberate and determined as the people and horses of the story, The Wake of Forgiveness compels us to consider the inescapable connections between sons and their mothers, between landscape and family, and between remembrance and redemption. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—near Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Ohio State University
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas

Bruce Machart is the author of the novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in October of 2010, and a forthcoming collection of short stories entitled Men in the Making, due out from HMH in 2011.

His fiction has been published in some of the country's finest literary magazines, including Zoetrope: All-Story, Story, One Story, Five Points, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. His short stories have been anthologized in Best Stories of the American West and Descant: Fifty Years. The winner of numerous awards and fellowships, Bruce is a graduate of the MFA program at The Ohio State University.

A native Texan, Bruce was born and raised in the Houston area. His father grew up on a cash-crop farm in rural south Texas not far from the Lavaca County landscape of The Wake of Forgiveness, and Bruce's mother was born in the deep south (and named her son after her favorite little town: Bruce, Mississippi). After high school, Bruce worked his way through eight years of undergraduate study before leaving for the midwest and graduate work in Columbus, Ohio. He later spent three years in the Boston area, where he taught literature and writing at Berklee College of Music, Boston University, and Grub Street Writers. In 2003, he returned to Houston, where he joined the faculty of Lone Star College. He is at work on a second novel. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
A mesmerizing, mythic saga of four motherless brothers at war with one another and with their stern father.... Above all, as its title promises, it's a story about forgiveness and a hard-won redemption.... [Machart] has a good ear for Western speech, and he writes as convincingly about an era he never experienced as he does about such diverse topics as cotton farming, quail hunting and gelding stallions. The echoes of McCarthy are loud in his lush style, but there are also undertones of Faulkner, Larry McMurtry, Norman Maclean and Charles Frazier. Machart blends these influences into a style uniquely his. The Wake of Forgiveness is a fine debut.
Philip Caputo - New York Times


The Wake of Forgiveness, which hails from the Robert Olmstead school of western, is a dark tale about fathers and sons, missing mothers and the poison that lies at the heart of the question, "Who's to blame?"
Yvonne Zipp - Washington Post


Machart's bleak, accomplished debut opens in 1895 as a landowning Texas family faces both sides of life's spectrum: the birth of a fourth son and the death of the boy's mother during childbirth. This event resonates throughout the lives of Vaclav Skala, who lost "the only woman he'd ever been fond of," and his four sons who, 15 years later, find their youngest sibling, Karel, to be a preternaturally talented equestrian. While Vaclav's wagers on his son's races increase, so does Karel's confidence, especially when facing off against the talk of the town: Guillermo Villaseñor, a powerful, moneyed, patronizing patriarch with three beautiful daughters. Yet Karel remains haunted by the memory of his mother, often feeling "the flat cool of her absence," and a prideful father who keeps him at arm's length. The consequences of a race that has his father's land hanging in the balance play out some 14 years later when, in 1924, Karel is married with children, yet still finds himself straying and facing inter-familial discord. Machart's moving story unfolds lyrically and sensually, with little fanfare, as his thoughtful prose propels a character-driven story about family, morality, and redemption.
Publishers Weekly


A wager destroys a farm family in this risk-taking first novel about Czech immigrant landowners in early 20th-century South Texas. Hard men are grabbing land any way they can. Vaclav Skala has been softened by a loving wife, who has borne him three sons, but when she dies giving birth to a fourth (Karel), he reverts to his old self, the hardest of taskmasters. He has his boys, not horses, plow the fields; they will be marked for life by misshapen necks. In 1910, their lives are upended by the arrival of Villaseñor, a hugely rich Mexican looking for land and husbands for his three comely daughters. He proposes a horserace to Vaclav; if he wins, he'll marry off his girls. Vaclav, confident in his racehorse and Karel's riding skills, agrees. The race is a fine set piece. Villaseñor, the superior strategist, has already won over the older boys, who will ignore some dirty tricks. Karel loses to Graciela, the Mexican's youngest. There are recriminations. After a vicious fight, Vaclav banishes his three oldest, who marry the next day. What next? A violent blood feud? Not at all. Machart is after more than stirring melodrama. The cadences of his formal prose, punctuated occasionally by earthy dialogue, tell you that, just as his shuttling between 1910 and 1924 minimizes suspense. He is making a resonant statement about the deformities of a world in which men make the rules, and mothers are dead or powerless. This involves the introduction, in 1924, of benighted twins, teenage brothers, firebugs who have avenged their dead mother by burning to death the father who brutalized her. There is much more, including bootlegging rivalries and a second deadly fire, but the trouble is, Machart fails to integrate plot and theme, and the novel splinters into a variety of episodes, all of them rendered with flair. Though he navigates erratically within it, Machart has created a dense, vibrant world, achievement enough for his debut.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The book opens with Karel’s birth, which is also the occasion of his mother’s death. How does this change the family dynamic? How does it introduce the themes of guilt and shame and how do you see these themes continue throughout the book?

2. In the book’s opening pages, we see Sr. Villasenor establish himself at the local bank. When he is condescended to by the banker, how does he get his revenge? How are Villasenor and Skala different sorts of men? How are they the same?

3. Discuss Karel’s relationship with his father. Vaclav never holds his infant son; later, the narrator says, “Karel wanted his pop’s strap, the stinging and unambiguous urgency of its attention, and, for Karel, the closest he got to his father’s touch” (p. 20). Where else do you see the correlation of violence with affection? How else does this correlation play out in Karel’s life?

4. On pages 30–31, Karel recounts a nightmare in which his father is kicked by a horse, then a horseshoe is nailed to his hand. What does this image of crucifixion signify in the story? Vaclav is far from Christ-like, but what sacrifice happens in the book? What redemption?

5. Karel is haunted by the absence of his mother. How does he seek maternal love? How does he confuse maternal love with something else?

6. On page 43, Karel kicks a pregnant cow. Why does he do this? How do we know this act is premeditated? What sorts of connections might Karel have between violence and money, or value? Where would those have come from?

7. The structure of the book is not strictly chronological.  Why do you think the author chose to structure the book this way? How do the characters unfold through this broken narrative? What is gained by seeing Karel and the other characters at different points in their lives?

8. Does Karel feel bonded with the Knedlik boys because of the way their fathers died? Was that a reliable trust? When you finally read the scene of Vaclav’s death, is it what you expected? Does this change how you feel about Karel?

9. Discuss the pivotal horserace between Karel and Graciela. What made this race different than any other race? How is this race different than the one Karel ran against the Dalton boy earlier in the book? What are we to understand about Karel’s sportsmanship?

10. After the race, during the fight that ensues between the Skala men, what does the author mean when he says the fight was “flawless in its wickedness”? Why does it feel like this fight was fated? What was gained, and what lost, in the fight?

11. There are a few short passages in the book told from the point of view of Father Carew. Why do you think the author chose to switch the narration for these few moments? What do we gain from his perspective?

12. Raymond Knedlik says to Karel, “‘You ain’t got any brothers, Skala, unless you’re talking about me and Joe here. Them others won’t claim you.’” (page 293). What does Karel think of this claim? What does being a brother mean to Karel? What do you think makes men into brothers?

13. The title of the book is “The Wake of Forgiveness.” Who is forgiven? Why? What comes in the “wake of forgiveness”?

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