The Solitude of Prime Numbers 
Paolo Giordano, 2010
Penguin Group USA
271 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670021482


Summary
Alice and Mattia are both misfits who seem destined to be alone. Haunted by childhood tragedies that mark their lives, they cannot reach out to anyone else. When Alice and Mattia meet as teenagers, they recognize in each other a kindred, damaged spirit.

When Mattia accepts a research position that takes him thousands of miles away, the two are forced to separate. Then a chance occurrence reunites them, forcing a lifetime of concealed emotion to the surface. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1982
• Where—Turin, Italy
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Primio Stega (Italy)
• Currently—lives in Turin, Italy

Paolo Giordano is a professional physicist in particle physics. The Solitude of Prime Numbers, his first novel, took Italy by storm where it has sold over a million copies. It is being translated into thirty languages and has sold all over the world. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
[A] flawlessly smooth American English version by Shaun Whiteside.... Writers and filmmakers have mined the romance of the "outsider" for decades and longer. But Giordano deromanticizes social alienation. Much of the pathos in these pages comes from the pain his emotionally crippled characters inflict on the people who care about them, people who don't understand that Mattia and Alice are unreachable.... The story—the explanation, really—of how two people come to find solitude more comforting than companionship is the subtle work of Giordano's haunting novel, a finely tuned machine powered by the perverse mechanics of need.
Richard Eder - New York Times

The fascination of Giordano's writing lies in his deft delineation of the personalities congealed in these frozen figures. Mattia and Alice emerge like ice sculptures against a human backdrop that the author animates, but which the characters themselves don't treat as real. They stand apart, outside — by choice and by compulsion. Writers and filmmakers have mined the romance of the "outsider" for decades and longer. But Giordano deromanticizes social alienation. Much of the pathos in these pages comes from the pain his emotionally crippled characters inflict on the people who care about them, people who don't understand that Mattia and Alice are unreachable. Trapped in closed circuits of self-involvement, they resemble intelligent, defective automatons who inspire emotions in others that they cannot return.... The story — the explanation, really — of how two people come to find solitude more comforting than companionship is the subtle work of Giordano's haunting novel, a finely tuned machine powered by the perverse mechanics of need.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times Book Review

A very accomplished book...A melancholic, but strangely beautiful, read. Shaun Whiteside's translation is exemplary and the acute descriptions of teenage competitiveness, angst and aspiration bring to mind Alan Warner's writing.
Guardian (UK)

In clear, heartbreakingly precise prose, the youngest ever winner of the prestigious Premio Strega (the Italian Man Booker) explores how trauma and guilt can capsize emotional stability and leave the vulnerable in a wash of unease and loss…a stunning achievement.
Daily Mail (UK)

Giordano's passionate evocation of being young and in despair will resonate strongly with readers under 30. Alas, overbearing parents, special-needs siblings, cruel classmates, physical and sexual insecurities, guilt, loneliness and grief are universal plagues.
Dierdre Donahue - USA Today

The misleading cover of the American edition features a photograph of two peas in a pod. But in truth, Alice and Mattia are only alike insofar as how strange and singular they are. They're twin primes, if you want to get fancy. Primes, Giordano writes, are "suspicious and solitary numbers," divisible only by one and by themselves. Twin primes "are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number" that prevents them from truly touching." Trust Giordano on this one he's a professional physicist. Also, there are 271 pages in this singular novel. You do the math.
Entertainment Weekly

Italian author and mathematician Giordano follows two scarred people whose lives intersect but can't seem to join in his cerebral yet touching debut. Alice and Mattia, both survivors of childhood traumas, are the odd ones out amid the adolescent masses in their high school. Mattia has never recovered from the loss of his sister, while Alice still suffers the effects of a skiing accident that damaged her physically and stunted her ability to trust. Now teenagers, Mattia, also addicted to self-injury, has withdrawn into a world of numbers and math, and Alice gains control through starving herself and photography. When they meet, they recognize something primal in each other, but timing and awkwardness keep their friendship on tenuous ground until, years later, their lives come together one last time. Giordano uses Mattia and Alice's trajectory to ask whether there are some people—the prime numbers among us—who are destined to be alone, or whether two primes can come together. The novel's bleak subject matter is rendered almost beautiful by Giordano's spare, intense focus on his two characters.
Publishers Weekly

Just as a prime number is divisible only by one and itself, so, too, are Mattia and Alice both "primes": social misfits unable to fit others into their lives. Giordano's debut novel, winner of Italy's Premio Strega Award, explores these fascinating characters' inability to overcome the tragedies of their childhoods to form lasting bonds with their families and friends, or with each other. The author's straightforward and concise approach to storytelling is refreshing; actor/narrator Luke Daniels engagingly presents the material. Featuring complex characters worthy of discussion, this short work of literary fiction would make a great book-club pick. —Johannah Genett, Hennepin Cty. Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal

Two traumatized loners who meet as teens spend years grappling with a powerful connection that terrifies them both. It's love, or something like it, for 15-year-old Alice Della Rocca when she first lays eyes on Mattia Balossino in the halls of her school. She recognizes a kindred spirit in the awkward, intelligent boy, who sports a bandage on his hand, the result of a shocking self-harming episode. Anorexic, with a bad leg from a childhood ski accident, Alice insinuates herself into Mattia's life in spite of the wall he has put up around himself, and the two settle into an odd but lasting friendship. Preferring not to be touched and feeling most at home in his math studies, Mattia comes to see both himself and Alice as "twin prime" numbers-similar, but always separated. Eventually, after graduating from college, he reveals to Alice the awful secret behind his cutting habit. At the age of seven he left his retarded twin sister Michela in a local park to attend a birthday party, and she was never seen again. His confession brings the two closer, but soon after Mattia takes a job at a university overseas, in part to escape his feelings for Alice. Once there he flourishes in his career while carefully avoiding personal entanglements. Alice in turn settles down with an outgoing doctor she believes can give her a normal life. But the two never forget each other, and when Alice's life takes a difficult turn she summons Mattia back to Italy. He comes, knowing full well that surrendering to his attraction to her holds equal parts pain and pleasure. A bestseller in Europe, winner of the Premio Strega in the author's native Italy, this compelling debut shows a remarkable sensitivity and maturity inthe depiction of its damaged soulmates. Fragile, unconventional love story by a talent to watch.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. What pleasure or power do Mattia and Alice get from harming their bodies? Think about the moments in the novel when these acts occur. Do you think they are in response to something and, if so, what?

2. There is a brief moment at Viola’s party where Alice and Mattia walk together and their respective scars seem to melt into one another and disappear. How? In what other ways are Mattia and Alice complementary?

3. Examine the relationship between Alice and Viola. Based on Alice’s feelings toward Viola and Viola’s treatment of Alice, what do you think about Alice’s actions when they meet later in life?

4. What is it about adolescence that makes people so cruel? What was your own adolescence like? Did Mattia’s and Alice’s experience with their peers echo your own in any way?

5. Where are the parents in this novel? What presence or power do they assert? Why?

6. Was Mattia’s action with his sister understandable? Was he aware of the possible consequences or not? Should children be held accountable when their actions have such severe consequences?

7. One of Alice’s few pleasures in life is photography, an art that consists of capturing a moment and presenting it according to one’s own perspective. Why is this pursuit appropriate for Alice?

8. Mattia believes that “feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build.” What do you think he means by this?

9. Do you think Alice really sees Michela in the hospital or was she hallucinating? Why?

10. Examine the last paragraph of the novel. What is being said here? What happens to Alice? What happens to Mattia?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Dearly Departed 
Elinor Lipman, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375724589


Summary
With her latest work, Elinor Lipman expertly serves up her usual delicious dish of entertainment. When the story opens, the not-so-sunny Sunny Batten has just received news that causes her to be even more morose than usual: her mother, Margaret Batten, has died in a freak accident with Margaret’s alleged fiancé, Miles Finn. Thus Sunny returns to the small New Hampshire town of King George and to the charity bungalow on the edge of the country club’s golf course where Margaret raised Sunny by herself. While at the funeral, Sunny catches her first glimpse of the brash Fletcher Finn, Miles Finn’s son and self-described possessor of “a heart of plutonium.” And who can’t help but notice, as they sit together at the graveside, the resemblance between Sunny and Fletcher, “the flagrant display, wherever one looked, of Miles Finn’s genes” [p. 79]?

But mourning does not become Sunny. Bitter memories of her childhood come flooding back, triggered by encounters with her high school golfing teammates—all boys—and her embarrassment at discovering what her mother’s new midlife hobby had been: acting. To Sunny’s mortification, Margaret had blossomed from a divorced wallflower to a much-admired amateur actress in the town’s local theatre troupe, the King George Players, and, as her daughter discovers, the object of widespread affection.

Sunny’s return to King George proves that one can go home again, as her grief segues into pleasant alliances with the townspeople, in spite of past grievances and perceived slights. Among the hilarious, realistic, and endearing cast of characters with whom Sunny becomes reacquainted are Joey Loach, the detention hall high schooler who has become the town’s heroic police chief; Emil Ouimet, the town physician who wears his love for Margaret on his sleeve; and Randy Pope, the golf-team-captain-turned-respectable-lawyer. Even the wealthy Emily Ann Grandjean, who hired Fletcher to promote her unattainable political aspirations, seems to sympathize with Sunny, and she soon comes to learn that maybe King George is not such a bad place after all. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—October 16, 1950
• Where—Lowell, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—A.B. Simmons College
• Awards—New England Books Award For Fiction
• Currently—lives in North Hampton, Massachusetts, and New York, New York


Elinor Lipman is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, known for her humor and societal observations. In his review of her 2019 novel, Good Riddance, Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal wrote that Lipman "has long been one of our wittiest chroniclers of modern-day romance."

The author was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts. She graduated from Simmons College in Boston where she studied journalism. While at Simon, Lipman began her writing career, working as a college intern with the Lowell Sun. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, she wrote press releases for WGBH, Boston's public radio station.

Writing
Lipman turned to writing fiction in 1979; her first short story, "Catering," was published in Yankee Magazine. In 1987 she published a volume of stories, Into Love and Out Again, and in 1990 she came out with her first novel, Then She Found Me. Her second novel, The Inn at Lake Devine, appeared in 1998, earning Lipman the 2001 New England Book Award three years later.

Lipman's first novel, Then She Found Me, was adapted into a 2008 feature film—directed by and starring Helen Hunt, along with Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and Matthew Broderick.

In addition to her fiction, Lipman released a 2012 book of rhyming political tweets, Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus. Two other books—a 10th novel, The View from Penthouse B, and a collection of essays, I Can't Complain: (all too) Personal Essays—were both published in 2013. The latter deals in part with the death of her husband at age 60. A knitting devotee, Lipman's poem, "I Bought This Pattern Book Last Spring," was included in the 2013 anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting.

Lipman was the Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing at Smith College from 2011-12, and she continues to write the column, "I Might Complain," for Parade.com. Smith spends her time between North Hampton, Massachusetts, and New York City.

Works
1988 - Into Love and Out Again: Stories
1990 - Then She Found Me
1992 - The Way Men Act
1995 - Isabel's Bed
1998 - The Inn at Lake Devine
1999 - The Ladies' Man
2001 - The Dearly Departed
2003 - The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
2006 - My Latest Grievance
2009 - The Family Man
2012 - Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus
2013 - I Can't Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays
2013 - The View From Penthouse B
2017 - On Turpentine Lane
2019 - Good Riddance
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/27/2019.)

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Book Reviews
The Dearly Departed contains a core of dark and mordant wit that distinguishes it, in delightful ways, from the norm.
Washington Post

Almost nobody writes serious entertainment with more panache.
Chicago Tribune

Nothing short of brilliant.... A story so funny and so pleasurable that the reader can only wish it did not have to end.
Booklist

Lipman sets her breezy, workmanlike novel in King George, N.H., a small town where the sudden accidental deaths of a secretly engaged couple summon their two grown-up children to sort out the conundrum of their relation to each other. Both the dead woman's stoical daughter, Sunny Batten, and the man's cranky son, Fletcher Finn, possess an identical corona of satiny gray hair; both are 31; and neither has ever met the other, although their parents have been on-and-off lovers for years. Sunny, who lives in New York, grew up with her mother in King George, and as a girl was a serious golfer. Fletcher, who grew up in Pennsylvania, has just gotten himself fired as campaign manager to Emily Ann Grandjean, an annoying, anorexic rich-girl candidate in a New Jersey congressional race. One look at Sunny and Fletcher's resemblance to each other at the funeral and the town is abuzz with conjecture and benign gossip. Novelist Lipman, who knows from smalltown, confidently enters the head of everyone worth meeting in King George: chief of police Joey Loach, who survives a gunshot thanks to his mother's insistence that he wear a bulletproof vest; Sunny's former best friend, Regina, who married the captain of the golf team; and the waitress at the Dot, Winnie, who keeps tabs on everyone. After the initial plot is pleasantly sketched out, the work feels thin, and Lipman resorts to repetitious dialogue and switches in narrative voice to keep the action moving. Major characters like Sunny and Emily Ann begin to sound alike, and Fletcher's initial, endearing prickliness smoothes out predictably to allow Lipman to tidily tie up the ends of this unremarkable, occasionally humorous, mostly conventional light comedy.
Publishers Weekly

Readers can count on Lipman for stylish, sprightly novels imbued with a deep affection for her all-too-human characters. Her newest offering continues the high standard set by her first novel, Then She Found Me. When Sunny Batten, now in her early thirties, returns home to tiny King George, NH, following the accidental death of her mother and her mother's fiance, Miles Finn, she is thrown back into a milieu that she had gladly left years before. Sunny, the most talented golfer in high school, has nothing but unhappy memories of her adolescence, when she and her mother braved the displeasure of the town by forcing the school administration to make her a member of the previously all-male school golf team. The caring and sympathy that she now receives from everyone she meets comes as a shock, as does meeting Miles Finn's son, Fletcher. Fletcher could be her twin: he has the same facial structure and the same flyaway, prematurely gray hair. Were there pockets in her mother's past of which Sunny was unaware? In this delightfully breezy novel, Sunny learns that you can go home again, with surprisingly happy results.  —Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Library Journal

Another sharply observed, if avowedly romantic, comedy of manners from Lipman, an unreconstructed Janeite. Sunny Batten gets jolting news from the King George, New Hampshire, police. Her mother has died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, thanks to a faulty furnace. "She and her fiancé didn't suffer," the police chief tells her gently over the phone. Sunny—short for Sondra but unreflective of her general outlook on life—is devastated. Though they'd been living apart (college, a series of jobs), she and her mother had always been emotionally close. Or so she'd thought. But when she recovers enough to contemplate something other than her horrific loss, she finds that little in her mother's actual world corresponds to her own idea of it. Fiancé? How could there possibly be such a person when Sunny knew nothing of his existence? In the days that follow she learns much about Margaret Batten that comes as a surprise. Miles Finn, the putative fiancé, had in fact been her mother's secret lover for well over 30 years. In addition, there is every likelihood that his relationship to Sunny herself was weightier than she had at first been led to believe. And that being the case, certain ancillary conclusions are unavoidable. At the funeral, for instance—the double funeral, that is—Fletcher Finn, son of the deceased Miles, a brash young man only slightly younger than 31-year-old Sunny, materializes—disconcertingly. Which is to say that his resemblance to her is so striking that the assembled King George folks gasp collectively, leaving Sunny to consider the sudden, unnerving possibility of siblinghood. But not every revelation is disquieting. This is Lipman, after all, and the sensitive, kind police chief turns out to be Joey Loach, who sometimes sat behind Sunny—rather yearningly—in high school study hall. Austen would have approved: astringency with a happy ending.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. What physical characteristics or personality traits did Sunny inherit from her mother and father, who was presumably Miles Finn?

2. Regarding Fletcher and Sunny, Emily Ann observes, “Appearances aside, you two seem like complete opposites” [p. 190]. Do Sunny and Fletcher share any similarities other than their physical resemblance? How does each feel about discovering a new sibling? Does it mean more to Fletcher or Sunny? Why?

3. How does Lipman use physical surroundings to create a presence for Margaret and Miles despite their being deceased before the novel begins? [See, for example, the description of Miles’s cabin in Chapter 14 and the contents of Margaret’s house in Chapter 15.]

4. Sunny asks Joey: “Would a truly grief-stricken daughter go directly from the cemetery to the golf course? Or, between the wake and the funeral, give herself a pedicure” [p. 228]? Given the treatment of death and grief in the novel, how might these questions to be answered? Does Sunny handle her grief in an appropriate manner? A realistic manner?

5. A reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly noted, “Sunny learns a universal truth: Things get better after high school.” Do the memories of her high school harassment loom larger in Sunny’s mind than the facts support?

6. Is the grudge that Sunny holds against the high school boys’ golf team justified, or is Randy Pope fair in asserting that “some ladies roll with the punches. Some even laugh instead of carrying a grudge” [p. 137]?

7. In the small town of King George, everyone knows everyone else. This is highlighted best by Dr. Ouimet’s infuriating yet comical dilemma as he searches for someone in whom he can confide his feelings for Margaret: “Who in this town, be they counselor or clergy, wasn’t a patient?” [p. 215] How does Lipman paint life in King George and small town life in general?

8. About the golf course that was her backyard, Sunny says, “I know all the loopholes. All the best times to sneak onto the King George Links, virtually invisible” [p. 96]. And Sunny also comments about Margaret to Fletcher, “She was very conventional, and very worried about what other people thought. Above all else, she wanted to fit in” [p. 163]. As Sunny discovers, she was, and is, hardly invisible to the residents of King George. Moreover, her mother was somewhat less than conventional. In what other ways does The Dearly Departed explore this theme of appearance versus reality?

9. Joey’s mother hovers over and clearly adores her son. What does their relationship say about Joey, and how do his mother’s regular appearances advance the plot?

10. Despite their completely different upbringing, do Emily Ann and Sunny have anything in common? What significance do people’s socioeconomic backgrounds have in King George?

11. Who is the central character of The Dearly Departed? Do the actions of any one character dominate the plot? Does any one character’s viewpoint pervade the narrative?

12. Compare the characters who actively engage in life, such as Margaret, Randy Pope, Emil Ouimet, to those who choose to remain more passive, such as Regina Pope, Emily Grandjean, and Billy and Christine Ouimet. Into which category might Sunny, Fletcher, or Joey be placed? In The Dearly Departed, do people actually change, or is it just perceptions that change?

13. What role does dialogue play in The Dearly Departed? How do conversations reveal feelings and promote both character and plot development? What makes the conversations in the novel realistic?

14. Lipman has been called “a queen of verbal economy” (Boston Magazine). An example might be when we are told that Randy Pope, Sunny’s former archenemy, tracked down Margaret’s personal effects “in person, and found it misfiled in Concord” [p. 252]. Can you think of other examples of the author’s narrative shorthand?

15. Reviewer Maggie Galehouse writes, “If the cast of NBC’s Friends beamed into Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the result might well be Elinor Lipman’s latest novel. Set in King George, N.H. (a town that rivals Grover’s Corners in size and sensibility), The Dearly Departed has the charm and economy of Wilder’s play, along with the quick-witted, intently quirky characters of a successful sitcom” (The New York Times Book Review, July 15, 2001). Is the comparison between The Dearly Departed and a television sitcom apropos? If you are familiar with the Thornton Wilder play Our Town, how is it similar to The Dearly Departed?

16. To what genre of literature does The Dearly Departed belong? Is there a theatrical or dramatic style to the novel?

17. Neal Wyatt remarks, “It is a rare treat to read a book that is at once utterly modern but also evokes the world of Wooster and Jeeves” (Booklist, May 15, 2001). What elements of The Dearly Departed bring about this dichotomy of modernism and quaintness in prose, plot, descriptions, and characters?

18. Is the ending of The Dearly Departed a happy one? Is it satisfying or anticlimactic? Why might Lipman have chosen to end the novel where she does and leave certain questions unresolved? For example, what happens to Billy? Were Miles and Margaret actually engaged or not? Will Fletcher become romantically involved with Emily Ann? Based upon the ending, would you characterize Lipman as an optimist? A romantic?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Knit the Season (Friday Night Knitting Club #3)
Kate Jacobs
Penguin Group USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425236765

In Brief
Knit the Season is a loving, moving, laugh-out-loud celebration of special times with friends and family.

The story begins a year after the end of Knit Two, with Dakota Walker's trip to spend the Christmas holidays with her Gran in Scotland—accompanied by her father, her grandparents, and her mother's best friend, Catherine. Together, they share a trove of happy memories about Christmases past with Dakota's mom, Georgia Walker—from Georgia's childhood to her blissful time as a doting new mom. From Thanksgiving through Hanukkah and Christmas to New Year's, Knit the Season is a novel about the richness of family bonds and the joys of friendship. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Born—N/A
• Raised—near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—B.A., Carleton University (Ottowa); M.A., New
   York University
• Currently—lives near Los Angeles, California, USA

Kate Jacobs is the New York Times bestselling author of Comfort Food, Knit Two, and The Friday Night Knitting Club, which has over 1 million copies in print.

Kate grew up near Vancouver, British Columbia, in the scenic and delightfully named town of Hope (pop. 6,184). It’s an area filled with friends and family and Kate loves to visit. Back then, of course, it was tremendously boring, as only home can be to a teenager. As a result, Kate begged her parents to send her to boarding school in Victoria, BC. From there she traded in her navy blazer to earn a Bachelor’s degree in journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa. Next, in a fit of optimism/courage/naivete—take your pick—she followed it up with a move to bustling New York City (pop. 8,143,197).

The plan? Breaking into magazine publishing. First she received a Master’s degree at NYU and worked at a handful of unpaid internships, then got a spot as an assistant to the Books & Fiction Editor at Redbook magazine. It was here that Kate answered multiple phones, read a ton of slush (getting to know some wonderful writers-to-be), and began to experience the impact of sharing women’s stories. Around this time, Kate settled into an apartment complex that housed about as many people as her entire hometown in Canada: It seemed that she wasn’t just a small-town girl anymore.

Professionally, Kate made it a priority to explore content that resonated with women: She was an editor at Working Woman and Family Life and was later a freelance writer and editor at the website for Lifetime Television. Personally, as a newcomer to New York, she learned the power of building a surrogate family and stitching together friendship connections that will endure. Exploring the richness of women’s relationships is a key focus of her novels.

After a decade of Manhattan living, Kate moved to sunny Southern California with her husband. (And discovered that she likes suburban living just fine, thank you very much.)

She relished the idea of her very own home office but found herself setting up the laptop on the dining table, just as she’d done in New York, and writing late at night in her pajamas.

A firm believer in the creative power of free time, Kate loves to recharge by tackling knitting projects that she can finish quickly (all the better to feel that sense of accomplishment). She’s also a fan of taking naps, especially when she’s on deadline, snuggling under a favorite green-and-yellow afghan knitted by her grandmother decades ago. Her beloved liver-and-white English Springer Spaniel, Baxter, often snoozes alongside. (From the author's website.)

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Book Reviews
In this holiday special, friends brought together by a Manhattan knitting shop continue to gather for their weekly knitting sessions, this time focusing on Dakota, the young daughter of the shop's original owner. Dakota is running the shop and attending culinary school, intending to revamp the shop as a knitting café. Feeling overwhelmed, she decides to visit her grandmother in Scotland to gain some perspective and learns a lot about her late mother in the process.
Library Journal

Bland and predictable third installment of the Friday Night Knitting Club series (Knit Two, 2008, etc.). Georgia, founder and proprietor of Walker & Daughter yarn shop, died in the first novel, leaving daughter Dakota to be raised by formerly absentee father James and the knitting club stalwarts. Now 21-year-old Dakota is in culinary school and dreams of turning Walker & Daughter (run by Peri, when she's not designing handbags) into a knitting cafe. While making plans for this transition, Dakota wants everything to stay the same, but everything is changing. Octogenarian Anita is finally marrying her boyfriend, despite her wormy son Nathan's attempts to break them up. Darwin and Lucie are even more involved with their children. Catherine is going to marry Marco and maybe move to Italy. Peri has been asked by a couture label to move to Paris and run their knit division. And James has finally met a woman he's serious about. This is all too much for Dakota, who deeply feels Georgia's absence and associates change with loss. Maybe Christmas abroad will cheer her up. She relinquishes an important internship to travel with James, Georgia's parents and brother to visit her great-grandmother on a farm in Scotland. There Dakota learns important life lessons: Family is important, time is precious, unpleasant memories can be good and other homilies more appropriate to YA lit. Jacobs' prose is pleasant, and she smoothly juggles all the story lines, but there's just not much going on here. Numerous mentions of woolen goods neither improve the plotting nor make the characters more endearing. A quick stroll through familiar emotional territory rather than the epic voyage of self-discovery the author seems to have intended.
Kirkus Reviews

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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 Knit the Season:

1. What picture of Georgia Walker emerges from the reveries and flashbacks of the characters in this latest installment of the Friday Night Knitting Club series? What does Dakota come to learn about her mother? If you've read The FNKC and Knit Two, what more do you learn about Georgia? What new information is filled in for you?

2. In what ways has Georgia influenced her friends' lives and and how does her spirit continue to knit them together?

3. Relationships (family, friends, and lovers) are at the heart of this novel, as they are in FNKC and Knit Two. If you've read the first two, how have those relationships developed? What new (or old) stresses affect the characters? Catherine, for instance, and Anita and her son? If this is the first book you've read in the series...then talk about the relationships and their stress points as they exist now.

4. Darwin and Lucie, two of the series' more interesting characters, are somewhat relegated to the sidelines in this third book. Would you like to have seen more of them? What is fraying the edges of their friendship?

5. Talk about Dakota's career goals and the competing demands she feels? How does Peri's decision to make a move complicate things for Dakota?

6. Knit the Season, in many ways, is a coming-of-age story for Dakota. What anxieties must she overcome? What does she come to understand by the book's conclusion? What does she learn about herself and the choices she faces regarding career and family?

7. What do you believe is the central message found in Knit the Season?

8. How does this third book stack up against the others in the series? How important is it to have read the first two? If this is your first foray into Jacobs' Friday Night Knitting Club series, does this book make you want to read the previous two?

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

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Pavilion of Women 
Pearl S. Buck, 1946
~ 215 pp. (Varies by publisher.)


Summary
On her fortieth birthday, Madame Wu carries out a decision she has been planning for a long time: she tells her husband that after twenty-four years their physical life together is now over and she wishes him to take a second wife. The House of Wu, one of the oldest and most revered in China, is thrown into an uproar by her decision, but Madame Wu will not be dissuaded and arranges for a young country girl to come take her place in bed.

Elegant and detached, Madame Wu orchestrates this change as she manages everything in the extended household of more than sixty relatives and servants. Alone in her own quarters, she relishes her freedom and reads books she has never been allowed to touch. When her son begins English lessons, she listens, and is soon learning from the "foreigner," a free-thinking priest named Brother Andre, who will change her life.

Few books raise so many questions about the nature and roles of men and women, about self-discipline and happiness. (From Midpoint Trade Books edition.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—June 26, 1892
• Where—Hillsboro, West Virginia, USA
• Death—March 6, 1973
• Where—Danby, Vermont
• Education—schooled in China; B.A., Randolph-Macon
  Woman's College (Virginia); M.A. Cornell University
• Awards—Nobel Prize; Pulitzer Prize

Pearl S. Buck spent most of her life in China. She was the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces. The Good Earth won her the Pulitizer Prize, as well. (From the publisher.)

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Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu, was an award-winning American writer who spent the majority of her life in China. Her novel The Good Earth was the best-selling fiction book in the U.S. in 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. In 1938, she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."

Pearl was born in Hillsboro, West Virginia to Caroline Stulting (1857–1921) and Absalom Sydenstricker. Her parents, Southern Presbyterian missionaries, traveled to China soon after their marriage on July 8, 1880, but returned to the United States for Pearl's birth. When Pearl was three months old, the family returned to China, to be stationed first in Zhenjiang (then often known as Jingjiang or, in the Postal Romanization, Tsingkiang). Pearl grew up bilingual, tutored in English by her mother and in classical Chinese by Mr. Kung.

The Boxer Uprising greatly affected Pearl and her family. Pearl's Chinese friends deserted her and her family, and there were not as many Western visitors as there once were.

In 1911, Pearl left China to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College, graduating (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1914. From 1914 to 1933, she served as a Presbyterian missionary, but her views later became highly controversial in the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy, leading to her resignation.

In 1914, Pearl returned to China. She married an agricultural economist missionary, John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917, and they moved to Suzhou, Anhui Province, a small town on the Huai River (not be confused with the better-known Suzhou in Jiangsu Province). It is this region she described later in The Good Earth and Sons.

From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and John made their home in Nanking, on the campus of Nanjing University, where both had teaching positions. Pearl taught English literature at the University of Nanjing and the Chinese National University. In 1920, the Bucks had a daughter, Carol, afflicted with phenylketonuria. In 1921, Pearl's mother died and shortly afterward her father moved in. In 1924, they left China for John's year of sabbatical and returned to the United States for a short time, during which Pearl earned her Masters degree from Cornell University. In 1925, the Bucks adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh). That fall, they returned to China.

The tragedies and dislocations that Pearl suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March 1927, during "Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several Westerners were murdered. Since Absalom was a missionary, the family decided to stay in Nanjing until the battle reached the city. When violence broke out, a poor Chinese family allowed them to hide in their hut while the family house was looted. The family spent a day terrified and in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. They traveled to Shanghai and then sailed to Japan, where they stayed for a year. They later moved back to Nanjing, though conditions remained dangerously unsettled.

In 1935, the Bucks were divorced. Richard Walsh, president of the John Day Company and her publisher, became Pearl Buck's second husband. In 1935, she bought a sixty-acre homestead she called Green Hills Farm and moved into the one hundred year-old farmhouse on the property with her second husband and their family of six children. There she spent the next thirty-eight years of her life, raising her family of six children, writing, pursuing humanitarian interests, and gardening.

She completed many works while living in Pennsylvania: This Proud Heart (1938), The Patriot (1939), Today and Forever (1941), Pavilion of Women (1946), and The Child Who Never Grew (1950).

During the Cultural Revolution Buck, as a preeminent American writer of Chinese peasant life, was denounced as an "American cultural imperialist." Buck was "heartbroken" when Madame Mao and high-level Chinise officials prevented her from visiting China with Richard Nixon in 1972.

Pearl S. Buck died of lung cancer on March 6, 1973 in Danby, Vermont and was interred in Green Hills Farm in Perkasie, Pennsylvania. She designed her own tombstone. The grave marker is inscribed with Chinese characters representing the name Pearl Sydenstricker.

Activism
During her life Buck combined the multiple careers of wife, mother, author, editor and political activist.

Buck was highly committed and passionate about a range of issues that were mostly ignored in her generation; many of her life experiences and political views are described in her novels, short stories, fiction, children's stories, and the biographies of her parents entitled Fighting Angel and The Exile. She wrote on a diverse variety of topics including woman's rights, Asian cultures, immigration, adoption, missionary work, and war.

In 1949, outraged that existing adoption services considered Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable, Pearl established Welcome House, Inc., the first international, interracial adoption agency. In nearly five decades of work, Welcome House has placed over five thousand children. In 1964, to support children who were not eligible for adoption, Buck established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to "address poverty and discrimination faced by children in Asian countries."

In 1965, she opened the Opportunity Center and Orphanage in South Korea, and later offices were opened in Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. When establishing Opportunity House, Buck said, "The purpose...is to publicize and eliminate injustices and prejudices suffered by children, who, because of their birth, are not permitted to enjoy the educational, social, economic and civil privileges normally accorded to children."

In the late 1960s, Pearl toured West Virginia to raise money to preserve her family farm in Hillsboro, WV. Today The Pearl S. Buck Birthplace is a historic house museum and cultural center. She hoped the house would "belong to everyone who cares to go there," and serve as a "gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life."

Long before it was considered fashionable or politically safe to do so, Buck had challenged the American public to on topics such as racism, sexual discrimination and the plight of the thousands of babies born to Asian women left behind and unwanted wherever American soldiers were based in Asia. Anchee Min, author of a fictionalized life of Buck, broke down upon reading Buck, because she had portrayed the Chinese peasants "with such love, affection and humanity"

Legacy
Peter Conn, in his biography of Buck, argues that despite the accolades awarded her, Buck's contribution to literature has been mostly forgotten or deliberately ignored by America's cultural gatekeepers.

Pearl's former residence at Nanjing University is now the Nanjing University Science and Technology Industry Group Building along the West Wall of the university's north campus.

U.S. President George H.W. Bush toured the Pearl S. Buck House in October 1998. He expressed that he, like millions of other Americans, had gained an appreciation for the Chinese through Pearl's writing. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
(Older books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

The great, self-sufficient house with separate courtyards for each family within offers a rich variety of marital conditions which Mrs. Buck explores with authoritative completeness.... Its oriental setting should do nothing to limit the appeal of the highly provocative theme...although Madame Wu's chilliness may repel some readers.... Yet [the book] is a searching study of women written with high seriousnes and sympathy.... Mrs. Buck's grave, unaccented prose is well suited to the delicate matters at hand.
Mary McGrory - New York Times (11/24/1946)

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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 Pavilion of Women:

1. What do you make of Madam Wu? Describe her as a character. Over the years, she has cultivated perfection— would you consider her impeccability a strength or a flaw? How do her standards of wife and motherhood compare with ours...here and now? In what ways does she differ from her daughters-in-law?

2. Why is her marriage a disappointment to her? What prompts her, on her 40th birthday, to insist that her husband take a concubine? What do you think of Mr. Wu's reaction? Where do your sympathies lie, at this juncture?

3. As a Westerner (if you are), how do you feel—morally, ethically, or philosophically—about Madame Wu's insistence on a concubine? Do you find this custom troubling...if so, for whom? If not, why?

4. What about the rights and feelings of Ch'iumping (Autumn Brightness) who takes Madame Wu's place in her husband's bed. All actions have consequences, as does this one. What responsibility does Madame have toward the young woman?

5. Describe Brother Andre and his relationship with Madame Wu. What does he offer her—or represent to her? In what ways are his religious views unorthodox. How do they differ from those of Little Sister Hsia? How does he change Madame Wu? Do you find Brother Andre convincing as a character...or is he more a mouthpiece for Buck's ideas?

6. The book's conflict lies in the tension between personal freedom and larger responsibility to the group. How is that conflict resolved at the end.

7. What does Madame Wu come to learn about herself, her soul and freedom?

8. Are there particular passages in the book which struck you as particularly thoughtful or insightful? Or suprising? If so, read them to the group and discuss why they moved you.

9. Does this book deliver? Is it a compelling read? Are the characters engaging, the ideas significant? Are you satisfied with how the novel ended?

10. Have you read other books by Pearl S. Buck—The Good Earth, for instance? How does this one compare? What about by Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan...or perhaps Khaled Housseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. If so, are there any similarities?

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

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