Swimming
Joanna Hershon, 2002
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345442765

Summary
What happened the weekend that Aaron Wheeler brought his girlfriend Suzanne home to meet his family for the first time would change things forever.

In this remarkable, lyrically written debut novel, Joanna Hershon captures the ever-evolving aftermath of one tragic summer weekend for the Wheeler family in New Hampshire.

Swimming unfolds with uncommon power and a rich, interior narrative force. It is a gripping family story, a heartbreaking coming of age journey, and a suspenseful psychological investigation into the meanings of identity, fidelity, and intimacy. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
Joanna Hershon received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from Columbia University in 1999. She has been a Breadloaf Working Scholar, an Edward Albee Writing Fellow, and a twice produced playwright in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband. Swimming is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

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Book Reviews
Brother kills brother, and a younger sister makes their story her own in this lush but unsteady modern-day Cain and Abel tale by first-timer Hershon. On a beautiful summer weekend, Aaron Wheeler brings his college girlfriend, Suzanne, home to meet his family in New Hampshire. Golden boy Aaron is a few years older than his volatile, difficult brother, Jack; their little sister, Lila, is eight. The visit is pleasant if tense, as Suzanne finds herself drawn to Jack against her better judgment. Late one night after a party, Suzanne and Jack end up swimming alone together at the lake behind the house. As Jack makes it back to shore, naked, Aaron is waiting for him. Jack's death is made to look like an accident—it is said that he fell on the rocks—and Aaron disappears, dropping out of college. When Hershon picks up the narrative 10 years later, the story is resumed from Lila's point of view. Now living in New York City and teaching private English classes, she stumbles through her daily life, glimpsing Aaron or Jack in all the men she sees. A chance encounter with Suzanne focuses her determination to discover what really happened that night in New Hampshire and to find Aaron again. Hershon's carefully worked prose aspires to hothouse perfection, but overworked metaphors and forced turns of phrase undermine its effectiveness. At moments, the narrative invites readers to sink beneath its surface, but Hershon fails to sustain the dark, atmospheric morass she cultivates.
Publishers Weekly

Memory and desire—these two words sum up this immersive novel. Memory of a summer night, a lake, an accident. Desire of Aaron for Suzanne, of Suzanne for Jack. Lila's memories of her brothers and her desire to make sense of the past. Hershon wraps you in her spell, intimately creating fine details—the prickliness of wet skin drying in the dark, the sound of a pale green porcelain teacup breaking, the smell of a dingy hotel room. Like Jane Hamilton or Sue Miller, she has an eye for place, an ear for dialog, and true feeling for character. While the details serve to propel the plot forward, the dialog brings to life characters so real that they breathe behind you. Marred only by two coincidences used to advance the story, this is a work of real feeling, talent, and great beauty. Buy a copy and dive in. —Yvette Olson, City Univ. Lib., Renton, WA
Library Journal

Hershon's first novel is an engrossing tale of love, redemption, and second chances. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist

Unrealized or discarded possibility are both the subject and nature of this earnest debut, a story reminiscent of the family-centered fiction of Sue Miller and Jane Hamilton. It begins in 1966, when Jeb Wheeler meets Vivian Silver and impulsively brings her to his house in the New Hampshire woods. The action then fast-forwards to 1987: the Wheelers' eldest son Aaron, 21 years later, has brought his gorgeous girlfriend Suzanne Wolfe for a visit. His parents are barely glimpsed presences (as they remain in fact), but Hershon focuses close attention on Aaron's mercurial eight-year-old sister Lila and especially his brother Jack, a vaguely sinister, sardonic misfit to whom Suzanne finds herself helplessly attracted. A midnight swim following a chaotic party at a friend's house shatters the Wheelers' already precarious solidarity, ends Aaron's relationship with Lila, sends him into self-imposed exile—and leads to a long final sequence dominated by the heretofore peripheral figure of Lila. Another decade has passed: she's now a student and part-time tutor in New York City, and she directly engages the ghosts of the Wheelers' past upon reencountering (now married) Suzanne and laboriously extracting the truth about her family's losses and Aaron's whereabouts. In a scarcely credible series of scenes, Lila finds Aaron (who doesn't recognize her), acknowledges in herself the tortuous complex of motives and emotions experienced by the people whom she's been quick to blame, and achieves a muted reconciliation. Much of Swimming absorbs and satisfies, because Hershon writes lucid, stinging dialogue and movingly conveys the sense of hollowness and waste that overpowers the lives of the people. The characterizations are sketchy, however, making for both an intermittently static and overlong read. A flawed if interesting debut by a more than capable writer who'll surely give us better.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. What does the title suggest, and what varieties of "swimming" are involved in the action? How does the swim at the story's start contrast with the plunge at the end?

2. Do the three epigraphs (from Marilynne Robinson, Emily Dickinson, and Martin Buber) constitute a kind of progression for the three parts? How does Dickinson's phrase—"The truth must dazzle gradually"—describe the story line?

3. Twenty-one years elapse between the action of the Prologue and Part One, and ten years elapse between Part One and Two. Parts Two and Three, however, are directly sequential. What is the author telling us about the presence of the past and the healing passage of time?

4. Can you come up with reasons for the brothers' sibling rivalry? Why are they so angry with each other, and is Suzanne a kind of lightning rod for the trouble that erupts between them, or is she the trouble itself?

5. What motivates Pria's behavior? In what ways does she change between the first and second time we meet her, and do you feel she's trying to atone for her actions at the party and on the night of Jack's death?

6. The same question could well be asked of Suzanne. How sympathetic is the author to this character/seductress? Why is it, do you think, that she's willing to acknowledge Lila during that first meeting in New York?

7. Both Lila and Aaron have the habit of calling their parents and then hanging up. What does this tell us about the nature of communication in the Wheeler clan?

8. We know what's under Sylvie's bed and what the red box contains. What would Aaron (as David Silver) have of hers under his own bed?

9. In what ways is this a time-bound piece (describing the nature of the counter-culture in the 1980s, the drug culture in the 1990s, etc.), and in what ways does the family dynamic exist outside of a specific time and place?

10. Imagine Swimming as a set of linked short stories or as a movie or play. What would be gained and what lost?

11. Why does Lila disguise herself as Abby in her brother's house? What causes her to come out of hiding and reveal herself at last?

12. Is it realistic that a brother would not know his sister after a decade of growth? And why should Lila recognize a woman she's seen only once, when she herself was eight years old at the time, and who now has spent ten years thereafter in New York City?

13. Describe a day in 1967 in which Jeb and Vivian Wheeler are alone in the house he has built and to which she moves when they're first married. Describe the same day in 1997 when they are alone in the house once more—with one of their three children dead and the other two away.

14. Imagine the visit to Portsmouth from Ben's point of view. Why does he get so angry at Lila when she says she needs to run an errand by herself?

15. Imagine the scene when Suzanne returns to her husband after she tells Lila what happened on the fateful night in 1987. What does she tell Richard and how does he respond?

16. If this novel had been told in the first person, who would be its likely narrator and why?

17. In what ways does the scene of the party at the lake outside Ann Arbor (Part Three) repeat what happened at the party in the Wheelers' pond (Part One)? Look for variations on the theme and what those changes might mean.

18. "The water was blue and the sky was pink and the trees flourishing green. 'Are you okay?' she said. He said he was full of awe." This climactic moment at the end of Chapter Twenty-five is a scene of rebirth and redemption, clearly. To what extent is it also, in the formal sense, religious? Is Aaron's time in Israel and his shelf of Biblical texts directly relevant here?

19. What will happen when Aaron goes home and arrives at the house once again?

20. These were nineteen questions. Formulate twenty more.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Some readers find the publisher's questions (above) too difficult. You might find these LitLovers "talking points" more helpful—at least to get a discussion off the ground:

1. Talk about the two brothers, Aaron and Jack. How would you describe their relationship? In what ways are they different from one another?

2. What draws Suzanne to Jack? What is her role in (or her responsibility for) what follows? What do you think of Suzanne —at the time we first meet her and, again, 10 years later?

3. What does Lila know—or believe she knows—about the tragedy at the pond? In what way does it affect her, both in the immediate aftermath and when we meet her 10 years later? How would you describe her state of mental health in the second half of the novel?

4. What do you think about the two coincidences in the book? Are they credible? Do they ruin the book for you, or do you accept them as necessary to further the plot?

5. Talk about what happens when Lila finds Aaron? Is he different from his younger self (in the first half of the book)? Do you find it believable that Aaron doesn't recognize his sister? Why does Lila play along, choosing not to reveal her identify until later?

6. Ultimately, what does Lila come to understand by the end of the novel? How is she changed by what she learns? (Keep in mind, here, that what a character learns by the end of a book is usually one of the central themes an author has been exploring throughtout the course of the novel.)

7. Are you pleased with how the book ends?

8. Overall, do you find Swimming a satisfying read? Why or Why not? Do you feel Hershon gives too much detailed description...or is it her attention to detail appropriate and well-rendered? What about Hershon's characters: are they fully-developed as complex human beings...or rather flat and under developed?

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

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Hotel World
Ali Smith, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385722100


Summary 
Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.

Forget room service: this is a riotous elegy, a deadpan celebration of colliding worlds, and a spirited defense of love. Blending incisive wit with surprising compassion, Hotel World is a wonderfully invigorating, life-affirming book. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—Inverness, Scotland, UK
• Eduation—University of Abderdeen; Cambridge University
• Awards—Whitbread Award
•Currently—lives in Cambridge, England


Ali Smith is a Scottish writer who won the Whitbread Award in 2005 for her novel, The Accidental. To date, she has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times and the Orange Prize twice.

She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at the University of Aberdeen and then at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a PhD that she never finished.

She worked as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde until she fell ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She then became a full-time writer and now writes for The Guardian, Scotsman, and Times Literary Supplement. She lives in Cambridge, England, with her partner filmmaker Sarah Wood.

Works
Smith is the author of several works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World (2001), which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize in 2001. She won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. ♦  The Accidental (2007) won the Whitbread Award and was also short-listed for both the Man Booker and Orange Prize.  ♦  Her 2011 novel, There But For The, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize and named as a Best Book of the Year by both the Washington Post and Boston Globe.  ♦  How to Be Both (2014) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories.

In 2007 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

In 2009, she donated the short story "Last" (previously published in the Manchester Review Online) to Oxfam's Ox-Tales project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the "Fire" collection. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/20/2014.)

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Book Reviews
In this voice from beyond the grave Ali Smith has created the perfect literary ghost...imbued with a powerful sense of wonder at the minutiae of everyday sensuality...and her beautiful, vivid descriptions are reinforced by a sharp, unsentimental tongue.
Times (London)


Where British reviewers see ambition, subtlety and wild imagination, all I can detect are leaden whimsy and mechanistic storytelling. Hotel World turns out to be a thin piece of work, one that fails to deliver on the promise implicit in its title—for, rather than explore the entire world of a hotel, with its broad array of guests, staff and casual visitors, Smith concentrates on a handful of characters who seem hostile to the very notion of professional hospitality.
Michael Upchurch - New York Times


To her considerable credit as a writer, Smith manages to have her characters approach these grim subjects in moods of humor and unselfconscious bumbling, which makes Hotel World a greatly appealing read.
Chris Lehmann - Washington Post


The heart of Scottish writer Ali Smith may belong to good old-fashioned metaphysics—to truth and beauty and love beyond the grave—but her stylistic sensibility owes its punch to the Modernists. She's street-savy and poignant at once, with a brutal sense of irony and a wonderful feel for literary economy. There's a kind of stainless-steel clarity at the center of her fiction.
Boston Globe


Hotel World is compelling...precisely because it suggests shifting yet coherent perspectives rather than simplifying lives into rigid, inert realities. Most impressively, Smith has mastered sophisticated literary techniques, which never intrude or bog down a delectable narrative of human perception and rumination. Apart from establishing Ali Smith as a novelist with the skills of a Martin Amis and Samuel Beckett combined, Hotel World is a damn good read
San Francisco Chronicle


[In] Smith's hands, this slender plot serves as an excuse for a delightfully inventive, exuberant, fierce novel of which the real star is not the dead Sara, or any of the living characters, but the author's vivid, fluent, highly readable prose. Hotel World was a well-deserved finalist last year for two prestigious British prizes: the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize.... I can't begin to paraphrase all that this dazzling book conveys about humanity and mortality.
Margot Livesey - Newsday


Featured are five women whose lives (and a death) overlap at the Global Hotel, a generic establishment in an unnamed city in England.... Smith's narrative style varies with each character and is generally exciting and quite successful, although some readers will find the acrobatics tiring. The connections she makes between the characters across class lines and even across the line between life and death are driven home in a beautifully lyrical coda.
Publishers Weekly


A heartfelt and introspective ghost story, Hotel World begins at the end and works backward and then meanders some in between.... [C]haracters come together in a tender, moving story of innocence, love, and kindness. Highly recommended. —Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA
Library Journal


A...verbally high-speed tale of a girl's death that may touch some but will seem mainly airy to others..... The pieces do finally come together, yet all remains oddly mechanical, no matter how many words and pages accumulate, and accumulate, and accumulate. One feels as though Smith were taking as long as possible on as little as possible to make things seem as important as possible.
Kirkus Reviews

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Book Club Discussion Questions 

Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Hotel World:

1. What is this book about? Start by asking what major issues Ali Smith examines. Be sure to consider the title. (Actually, this is a question you might want to return to later on.)

2. Follow-up to Question #1: Why does Smith center her novel around the ghost of a dead girl? Why death...and why ghost? What is Smith exploring?

3. What does Sara hope for when she remarks...

What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe...so that it jags into different parts of the sole and hurts just enough to be pleasure.

Or when she says, "A mouthful of dust would be something." How does Sara's yearning suggest the novel's thematic concerns? (Notice the homophone, sole/soul.)

4. Speaking of homophones—Smith peppers her text with clever wordplay. Go through the novel and pick out some examples, such as Else's "rebegot" and Lisa's "rebiggot." Can you find others?

5. Follow-up to Question #4: Reviewers have commented on Smith's remarkable facility with words, her wit and playfulness. Yet questions have also been raised as to whether her style is all surface gloss...or whether she mines deeper issues. What's your opinion?

6. Presumably Sara's death is accidental, stemming from a dare with a young porter. Yet there is also a hint of suicide. What do you think? And if it is suicide, would it make a difference in how you think about the novel?

7. What is Lise's illness all about? Why does she invite Else to spend a night at the hotel? (Don't overlook the wordplay in the two names—Lise/Else.)

8. Why is Lise so enraged about both the hotel and Penny? What do they represent to her? Are they deserving of Lise's hostility?

9. Consider Else as a character. What does her watching TV through other peoples' windows suggest about her (thematically or otherwise)? What about her elisions—was it heard for you to understand her speech? Did you find it humorous or irritating? What do we come to learn, or suspect, about Else's past?

10. Why does Smith set the novel in a hotel? How does the setting work as the book's central metaphor? Think of people checking in...and out of a hotel...every hour, every day. What else does a hotel suggest?

11. Follow-up to Question #10: Think about the hotel as a specific corporate entity. What does the "Global Hotel" suggest about the values and practices of contemporary society? In what way, then, is this novel a social critique?

12. Talk about the ways in which Claire reacts to Sara's death? Why does she collect her dust and trophies, dress up in her uniform, and try to work out how many seconds it took for her to fall to her death. Is Clare's reaction normal or obsessive? Do you find her presence in the novel morbid or endearing...or what?

13. Think about how Clare forms the link between the other characters. Is this story really hers? In what way is she instrumental in the novel's achieving a sort of stasis at the end?

14. Talk about the section titles and their meaning: Past, Present Historic, Future Conditional, Perfect, Future in the Past, and Present. Clearly these are references to time. Where else is time mentioned? What is its importance to the novel?

15. Trace the stages of grief in the novel, particularly as represented through the characters.

16. As a postmodernist, Ali Smith has sprinkled her "text" with postmodern theory: indeterminacy of words; fragmentation of consciousness and experience; impermanence; tenuousness of cause-and-affect...and of life in general. Can you locate those ideas in Hotel World?

17. Finally, do you like this book? Did you enjoy reading it?

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

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Dear John 
Nicholas Sparks, 2006
Grand Central Publishing
352pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446567336


Summary
An angry rebel, John dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army, not knowing what else to do with his life—until he meets the girl of his dreams, Savannah. Their mutual attraction quickly grows into the kind of love that leaves Savannah waiting for John to finish his tour of duty, and John wanting to settle down with the woman who captured his heart.

But 9/11 changes everything. John feels it is his duty to re-enlist. And sadly, the long separation finds Savannah falling in love with someone else. "Dear John," the letter read...and with those two words, a heart was broken and two lives were changed forever.

Returning home, John must come to grips with the fact that Savannah, now married, is still his true love—and face the hardest decision of his life. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—December 31. 1965
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame
• Currently—lives in New Bern, North Carolina


Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter and producer. He has published some 20 novels, plus one non-fiction. Ten have been adapted to films, including Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John, The Last Song, The Lucky One, and most recently The Longest Ride.

Background
Sparks was born to Patrick Michael Sparks, a professor of business, and Jill Emma Marie Sparks (nee Thoene), a homemaker and an optometrist's assistant. He was the middle of three children, with an older brother and a younger sister, "Dana", who died at the age of 33 from a brain tumor. Sparks said that she is the inspiration for the main character in his novel A Walk to Remember.

His father was pursuing graduate studies at University of Minnesota and University of Southern California, and the family moved a great deal, so by the time Sparks was eight, he had lived in Watertown, Minnesota, Inglewood, California, Playa del Rey, California, and Grand Island, Nebraska, which was his mother's hometown during his parents' one year separation.

In 1974 his father became a professor of business at California State University, Sacramento teaching behavioral theory and management. His family settled in Fair Oaks, California, and remained there through Nicholas's high school days. He graduated in 1984 as valedictorian from Bella Vista High School, then enrolled at the University of Notre Dame under a full track and field scholarship. In his freshman year, his team set a record for the 4 x 800 relay.

Sparks majored in business finance and graduated from Notre Dame with honors in 1988. He also met his future wife that year, Cathy Cote from New Hampshire, while they were both on spring break. They married in 1989 and moved to New Bern, North Carolina.

Writing career
While still in school in 1985, Sparks penned his first (never published) novel, The Passing, while home for the summer between freshman and sophomore years at Notre Dame. He wrote another novel in 1989, also unpublished, The Royal Murders.

After college, Sparks sought work with publishers or to attend law school, but was rejected in both attempts. He then spent the next three years trying other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone and starting his own manufacturing business.

In 1990, Sparks co-wrote with Billy Mills Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book was published by Random House sold 50,000 copies in its first year.

In 1992, Sparks began selling pharmaceuticals and in 1993 was transferred to Washington, DC. It was there that he wrote another novel in his spare time, The Notebook. Two years later, he was discovered by literary agent Theresa Park, who picked The Notebook out of her agency's slush pile, liked it, and offered to represent him. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for The Notebook from Time Warner Book Group. The novel was published in 1996 and made the New York Times best-seller list in its first week of release.

With the success of his first novel, he and Cathy moved to New Bern, NC. After his first publishing success, he began writing his string of international bestsellers.

Personal life and philanthropy
Sparks continues to reside in North Carolina with his wife Cathy, their three sons, and twin daughters. A Roman Catholic since birth, he and his wife are raising their children in the Catholic faith.

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly reported that Sparks and his wife had donated "close to $10 million" to start a private Christian college-prep school, The Epiphany School of Global Studies, which emphasizes travel and lifelong learning.

Sparks also donated $900,000 for a new all-weather tartan track to New Bern High School. He also donates his time to help coach the New Bern High School track team and a local club track team as a volunteer head coach.

In addition to track, he funds scholarships, internships and annual fellowship to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
It isn't hard to picture John Tyree. We can simply imagine his predecessors, men in uniform staring pensively from earlier wartime romances. Apart from the occasional detail—e-mail, cellphone, Outback Steakhouse—Dear John could take place in any modern American era. For Sparks, weighty matters of the day remain set pieces, furniture upon which to hang timeless tales of chaste longing and harsh fate. Only in a novel such as this could we find our political buzzwords—peacekeeping, IEDs, hurricane relief—interspersed with these sentiments: "And when her lips met mine, I knew that I could live to be a hundred and visit every country in the world, but nothing would ever compare to that single moment when I first kissed the girl of my dreams and knew that my love would last forever."
Margaux Wexburg Sanchez - Washington Post

Hot on the heels of True Believer and sequel At First Sight, Sparks returns with the story of ne'er-do-well-turned-army-enlistee John Tyree, 23, and well-to-do University of North Carolina special education major Savannah Lynn Curtis. John, who narrates, has been raised by a socially backward single postal-worker dad obsessed with coin collecting (he has Asperger's syndrome). John bypasses college for the overseas infantry; Savannah spends her college summers volunteering. When they meet, he's on leave, and she's working with Habitat for Humanity (he rescues her sinking purse at the beach). John has a history of one-night stands; Savannah's a virgin. He's an on-and-off drinker; she's a teetotaler. Attraction and values conflict the rest of the summer, but the deal does not close. Savannah longs for John to come home; her friend Tim longs to have a relationship with her. On the brink of John and Savannah's finally getting together, 9/11 happens, and John re-ups. Savannah's letters come less and less frequently, and before you know it, he receives the expected "Dear John" letter. Sparks's novel brims with longing.
Publishers Weekly

Sparks, a perennially popular novelist whose name is synonymous with romance and bittersweet endings and whose work translates so readily to movies, lives up to his reputation with his latest novel, a tribute to courageous and self-sacrificing soldiers. —Patty Engelmann
Booklist

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Discussion Questions 
1. In the first sentence of the prologue, John asks: "What does it mean to truly love another?" How does John’s answer to this question change over the course of the novel? How would you answer this question?

2. Savannah and John meet when John is on a furlough from the military and they fall deeply in love after only a few days. Is their love believable? Do you think it is possible to have such an intense connection with someone you’ve only just met?

3. Trying to explain her interest in John’s dad’s coin collection, Savannah says, "The saddest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t care deeply about anything at all. Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand." Do you agree with Savannah? Do you think John’s father is a satisfied man?

4. Why does John get so angry when Savannah suggests what she does about his father and how, in the end, does this revelation change John’s life and his relationship with his father?

5. Savannah is described by both herself and Tim as being somewhat naïve. Do you think Savannah is naïve? Why or why not?

6. When John goes back to Germany after his furlough, he and Savannah vow to stay in touch and to marry when he returns. Do you think it’s possible to stay in love with someone without seeing them for months or years at a time? How does being apart affect Savannah and John’s relationship?

7. John eagerly awaits his discharge from the military so he can begin a life with Savannah, but John also has a deep sense of duty and loyalty to his country and fellow soldiers. After September 11, John makes a decision that will change his life and Savannah’s life forever. Do you think John made the right decision? Does Savannah think he made the right decision? Given the outcome, do you think John regrets his decision?

8. Do you think Savannah should have waited for John to come home or do you think it was understandable that she moved on with her life?

9. After fighting in the war in Iraq, John has a hard time telling people about his experience there. Instead, when asked what it was like, he responds with a harmless anecdote about the sand because doing so “kept the war at a safe distance” for other people. What does John mean by this? In what ways does the Iraq War change John and what are his feelings about his role in the war?

10. After John’s father dies, he goes to visit Savannah. How has their relationship changed at this point? Is Savannah different from who she was in the beginning of the novel? Do you think Savannah is still in love with John?

11. How do you think John views Tim, and how do his perceptions change by the end of the novel?

12. What do you make of John’s actions at the very end of the novel? Would you have done what he did if you were in his position?

13. How do you interpret the novel’s ending? How do you imagine John’s future?
(Questions issued by publishers.)

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The Syringa Tree
Pamela Gien, 2006
Random House
254 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375759109

Summary
In this heartrending and inspiring novel set against the gorgeous, vast landscape of South Africa under apartheid, award-winning playwright Pamela Gien tells the story of two families—one black, one white—separated by racism, connected by love.

Even at the age of six, lively, inquisitive Elizabeth Grace senses she’s a child of privilege, “a lucky fish.” Soothing her worries by raiding the sugar box, she scampers up into the sheltering arms of the lilac-blooming syringa tree growing behind the family’s suburban Johannesburg home.

Lizzie’s closest ally and greatest love is her Xhosa nanny, Salamina. Deeper and more elemental than any traditional friendship, their fierce devotion to each other is charged and complicated by Lizzie’s mother, who suffers from creeping melancholy, by the stresses of her father’s medical practice, which is segregated by law, and by the violence, injustice, and intoxicating beauty of their country.

In the social and racial upheavals of the 1960s, Lizzie’s eyes open to the terror and inhumanity that paralyze all the nation’s cultures—Xhosa, Zulu, Jew, English, Boer. Pass laws requiring blacks to carry permission papers for white areas and stringent curfews have briefly created an orderly state—but an anxious one. Yet Lizzie’s home harbors its own set of rules, with hushed midnight gatherings, clandestine transactions, and the girl’s special task of protecting Salamina’s newborn child—a secret that, because of the new rules, must never be mentioned outside the walls of the house.

As the months pass, the contagious spirit of changesends those once underground into the streets to challenge the ruling authority. And when this unrest reaches a social and personal climax, the unthinkable will happen and forever change Lizzie’s view of the world.

When The Syringa Tree opened off-Broadway in 2001, theater critics and audiences alike embraced the play, and it won many awards. Pamela Gien has superbly deepened the story in this new novel, giving a personal voice to the horrors and hopes of her homeland. Written with lyricism, passion, and life-affirming redemption, this compelling story shows the healing of the heart of a young woman and the soul of a sundered nation. (From the publisher.)

The Syringa Tree has also been adapted to TV film in 2002.

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Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—Johannesburg, South Africa
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Obie Award for Best Play and Performance; Drama
   Desk Award for Performance; Outer Circle Award for
   Performance; Drama League Honor—all for 2001 for the
   stage version of Syringa.
• Currently—lives in California

Pamela Gien was born and raised in South Africa. She is the recipient of the Obie Award for Best Play 2001. She currently lives in the United States. The Syringa Tree is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

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The Syringa Tree had its world premiere at ACT in Seattle, followed by a two-year run in New York. Gien has since travelled around the world, including London and Cape Town, performing the play, astonishing audiences with her adept portrayal of such diverse characters, and moving them deeply through the raw emotions and profound insights contained within the story.

As both a writer and performer of The Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, a Drama League Honor, a nomination for the John Gassner Playwriting Award, and the Obie for both Performance and Best Play 2001. She shares these awards and her deepest gratitude with Matt Salinger, her producer and Larry Moss, her director.

She has also appeared in film in Men Seeking Women with Will Ferrell, and The Last Supper starring Bill Paxton, Jason Alexander, Charles Durning, and Ron Perlman.

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Book Reviews
Novels can be large, hardy vehicles, capable of surviving lackluster maintenance and neglected fine-tuning while still carrying readers to someplace worth visiting. This version of The Syringa Tree conveys, as pale fire, some of the brightness generated by Gien’s stage performances. Her original concept—to illustrate the breathtaking cruelty and lunacy of apartheid by detailing its effects on a small number of black and white characters—remains effective. A child’s bewildered response to the injustices inflicted on people she knows and loves seems entirely appropriate; only adults could have believed that apartheid made any practical or moral sense.
Paul Gray - New York Times Book Review

A spare, yet poetic account that steadily works its magic on the reader as both a portrait of individuals, and a country, in the tumultuous time of apartheid.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A gorgeous, hopeful, heartrending novel.... This uncommonly moving, deeply humane novel nearly dances in a reader's hands with the rhythms and the colors, the complicatedness and the inimitability of southern Africa.
O, The Oprah Magazine

(Based on the one-woman stage production.) South African writer and actress Pamela Gien's new one-woman play, The Syringa Tree, is the tragic story of two South African families—one black, one white— and the complex love they share, even as race stands between them. While this isn't unexplored territory, what makes this production a standout is Gien's impressive performance in creating 28 fully realized characters on a sparsely decorated stage. Through her expressive movements and creative vocalizations— most startlingly in rapid-fire exchanges between six-year old Elizabeth and her redoubtable, deep-voiced South African caretaker—Gien single-handedly fills the stage with the people, music and verdant countryside of South Africa.

Gien's dazzling performance only enhances the simple emotional power of the tale. What we see through the eyes of six-year-old Elizabeth, her black caretaker and the others who populate this story is that apartheid was not only fought in the frontline political struggle broadcast around the world, but also in the closely knit circles of families, in the intimacies of individual relationships and in the quiet but fierce struggles of personal conscience.
Time Magazine

Six-year-old Lizzie Grace sits in the syringa tree in her South African backyard whenever she's troubled. From there, she watches her Afrikaner neighbors and the black workers her part-Jewish family employs. Although her parents an always-busy doctor father and a depressed mother have tried to insulate themselves and their staff, it is impossible to shield Lizzie from the racism that permeates daily life. Indeed, as the meaning of apartheid unfolds, Lizzie struggles to understand racial laws that force her nanny to carry work papers and hide from the police. Through her eyes, readers see South African townships and experience the indignities that provoked underground resistance movements. Although the protagonist is occasionally cloying, this is part of the book's charm. Nonetheless, there are spots where the child's perspective weakens the text and leaves the reader hungry for more. For example, Lizzie's grandfather is murdered by a Rhodesian rebel, but the reason for this political crime remains unclear. South African-born Gien, who created this novel from her Obie Award-winning play of the same name, here illuminates a shameful history of a country by highlighting the juxtaposition of race, anti-Semitism, and class privilege. Highly recommended. —Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY.
Library Journal

(Adult/High School) Six-year-old Lizzy is present when her doctor father secretly delivers the baby of her nurse, Salamina, in a white suburb of South Africa in 1963. It becomes Lizzy's special responsibility to keep the infant hidden from the police as well as from the Afrikaner neighbors. As the irrepressible child grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep Moliseng hidden, and she is sent to the slums of Soweto to live with her grandmother. At the age of 14, she is killed by police as she leads other children in a final defiant and heartrending gesture, proclaiming her freedom. The narrative is told from the point of view of Lizzy, who grapples with the conflicting social, political, and religious values of the times and with her mother's depression. She finds comfort, if not answers, in the distracted attention of her father, the unconditional love of her nurse, and her own Syringa tree with its sweet-smelling blossoms. Readers will be carried away by lyrical descriptions of the sensual beauty of the veld and will experience the heartache of the characters as their lives are torn apart by the violence of the period. The story is as compelling and enlightening as Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, and the writing is evocative of that classic work. —Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
School Library Review

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Discussion Questions
1. The novel is set in South Africa during the time leading up to apartheid. The story is told from the point of view of a six-year-old girl for most of the novel. How does this affect the way you perceive the situation in South Africa?

2. Lizzy thinks, even before Moliseng is born, that it is her dire responsibility to protect and save her loved ones. She literally thinks her mother is “kept alive by her exceedingly good behaviour.” Why has she come to believe that her actions and thoughts will direct the fates of others?

3. Both Eugenie and Salamina are maternal with Lizzy. How are Lizzy’s relationships with them similar, and how are they different?

4. Family is a major force in Pamela Gien’s story. How does Lizzy understand and how does she feel about her mother, her father, and her grandfather? How does she understand/feel about Salamina and Moliseng? Does Lizzy perceive them to be equal members of the family? Is she aware of any differences?

5. Lizzy is raised by an atheist parent. How do you think this helps or hinders her in her chaotic environment? What of her credo: “Oh no nothing will happen God won’t let anything happen”?

6. Compare Lizzy’s two ‘siblings.’ Moliseng plays a large role at the beginning while John comes to fruition as a character much later in the story. Why do you think this is? Is it significant that she refers to Moliseng as “the speck” and to John by his real name?

7. Why do Lizzy’s parents choose to risk so much by allowing “the speck” to stay at their house?

8. What is the role of Moliseng’s character in the story? Think about her relationship to Lizzy, her social position, and her status in the world. What about Loeska? What is her role in the story? Do Moliseng and Loeska symbolize anything beyond their individual characters?

9. Why does Lizzy want to be friends with Loeska so desperately?

10. Why is the book named after a tree in the Grace family’s back yard? Think about its description in the novel, physical and otherwise, and about trees as symbols in general. Think about what goes on in and around this tree, and the spirituality it evokes.

11. Dr. Milton Bird tells Dr. Isaac Grace that Eugenie’s depression is “unrelated to circumstance.” Do you agree?

12. Why does Lizzy bludgeon the chameleon in her backyard?

13. Why was Grandpa George murdered? Why did the murderer steal Grandpa George’s medals?

14. Why do you think Salamina leaves? Why does she do it secretly, in the night, and not say goodbye?

15. Why does Lizzy finally return to Africa?

16. How does the book’s tone change throughout the novel? What factors provoke the change?

17. The themes of displacement and disappearance surface over and over again in the novel, both on personal and cultural levels. Who really is lost and who is gone? Who is trying to forget and who is forgotten?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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