Spill Simmer Falter Wither
Sara Baume, 2015 (2016, U.S.)
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544716193
Summary
A debut novel already praised as "unbearably poignant and beautifully told" (Eimear McBride) this captivating story follows—over the course of four seasons—a misfit man who adopts a misfit dog.
It is springtime, and two outcasts—a man ignored, even shunned by his village, and the one-eyed dog he takes into his quiet, tightly shuttered life—find each other, by accident or fate, and forge an unlikely connection.
As their friendship grows, their small, seaside town suddenly takes note of them, falsely perceiving menace where there is only mishap; the unlikely duo must take to the road.
Gorgeously written in poetic and mesmerizing prose, Spill Simmer Falter Wither has already garnered wild support in its native Ireland, where the Irish Times pointed to Baume’s "astonishing power with language" and praised it as "a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite."
It is also a moving depiction of how—over the four seasons echoed in the title—a relationship between fellow damaged creatures can bring them both comfort. One of those rare stories that utterly, completely imagines its way into a life most of us would never see, it transforms us not only in our understanding of the world, but also of ourselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Where—Lancashire, England (UK)
• Raised—County Cork, Ireland
• Education—M.F.A., Trinity College
• Awards—Davy Byrnes Short Story Award
• Currently—lives in County Cork, Ireland
Sara Baume has always immersed herself in images. In addition to being a highly acclaimed debut author (yes, "debut"—attaining resounding success with her very first novel), she is also a visual artist. It is an artistic sensibility that finds its way into her writing:
First and foremost I see; I see the world and then I describe it.... I don't know another way to write. I always anchor everything in an image.
That anchoring is clearly evident in her 2015 novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither. Critics have praised the book's vivid, poetic, even "dazzling" descriptions of the natural landscape.
Baume's short fiction has appeared in The Moth, Stinging Fly, Irish Independent, and other publications. Her story, "Solesearcher1," won the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award. Simmer Falter actually began as a short story before morphing into a novella and eventually into a full-fledged novel.
Personal
Baume was born in a caravan in Lancaster, England; her English father worked on rural gaslines, so the family traveled from place to place. But when there came to be too many children to fit in the van, they settled down in her mother's home country of Ireland. Lyndsay was four when the family moved to County Cork, and it is where she lives today with her two dogs. (Adapted from interviews with NPR and Totally Dublin. Retrieved 3/20/2016.)
Be sure to visit the author's blog.
Book Reviews
[A] lovely book…destined to become a small classic of animal communion literature.
Wall Street Journal
A tour de force.... No writer since JM Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy has written about an animal with such intensity. This is a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite. Again and again it wows you with its ambition…. At its heart is a touching and inspiriting sense of empathy, that rarest but most human of traits. Boundaries melt, other hearts become knowable…. This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness.
Joseph O'Connor - Irish Times
An ambitious stylist with an astonishing eye for detail and a clear passion for language. But it is the beautifully measured control of plot and the authenticity of the narrative voice that most impresses.
Irish Examiner
A deft and moving debut.... To capture this constrained setting and quiet character requires specific skills, which Baume has in spades.... It’s not easy to tell such a sparse tale, to be so economic with story, but the book hums with its own distinctiveness, presenting in singing prose an unforgettable landscape peopled by two unlikely Beckettian wanderers, where hope is not yet lost.
Guardian (UK)
Told in splendid prose, with lyrical descriptions of the landscape, it’s an involving story and possibly the best first novel to emerge from Ireland since Eimear McBride’s debut.
Herald (UK)
"[A] joltingly original debut.... Baume charts the growing dependency between these two stray souls with remarkable deftness and almost unbearable poignancy.
Mail on Sunday (UK)
Sara Baume’s exquisite debut has a simple plot: an outcast man and his dog One Eye take to the road in a ramshackle car and watch the world, weather and seasons change as they drive through the highways and byways of Ireland. But the prose is full of wonder, inventive, poetic and dazzling, concerned with the smallest detail of the natural landscape and the terrain of human emotion, as Baume heartbreakingly describes how an ordinary life can falter and stall.
Sunday Express (UK)
[A] fine debut.... Baume succeeds in reawakening her reader's capacity for wonder...so much so that the book and its one-eyed dog became companions I was loathe to leave.
Observer-Guardian (UK)
Ambitious and impressive.... Baume’s engaging, intriguing and brightly original first novel may mark a comparably significant debut.
Times Literary Supplement
One of the most quietly devastating books of the year…With Spill Simmer Falter Wither she has created a dark, tender portrait of what it’s like to live life on the margins.
Sydney Morning Herald
An unsettling literary surprise of the best sort. This first novel’s voice is singular in its humility and imaginative range.... What gives Baume’s book its startling power…is her portrait of an unexpectedly protean mind at work.... Baume’s prose makes sure we look and listen. Her book insists we take notice.
Atlantic
[Baume’s] rhythmic, intimate prose abounds with startling sights, smells and sounds.... [Her] sympathy for her 'wonkety' characters is infectious and their relationship—in all its drama and ordinariness—beautifully conveyed. Places and smells, plants and animals are conjured with loving attention, the narrative propelled by a striking linguistic intensity.... Baume’s capacity for wonder turns this portrait of an unusual friendship into a powerful meditation on humanity.
New Statesman
(Starred review.) This haunting debut novel by an award-winning Irish short story writer will appeal to readers who don't mind a little darkness in their dog stories. The detailed and almost poetic descriptions of the natural world as the seasons change add an element of enchantment to this lovely story. —Dan Forrest, Western Kentucky Univ. Libs., Bowling Green
Library Journal
Elegant, heartbreaking, and inspiring.... The lyric, lilting style of Baume’s voice will endear even animal non-lovers to her thrilling and transformative story. With echoes of Mark Haddon’s narrative style and a healthy dose of empathy for the lost and lonely among us, Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a superlative first novel.
Booklist
[I]t seems unreal that Ray could grow up without attending school and without any social services intervention. Baume perhaps means to make a statement about marginalized people..., but something doesn't quite ring true in Ray's isolation. The vague, sad ending doesn't help.
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)
1. Describe Ray. Why is he such an outcast? What about him makes the villagers keep their distance, even shun him? How would you react to Ray?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: In what way are Ray and One-Eye alike? Talk about how man's and dog's pasts have left them deeply scarred? In other words, how have their pasts shaped them both?
3. Talk about the presence of Ray's father, even though he died 18 months before the opening of the book. What role does he play in Ray's life, now and in the past?
4. Ray tells One Eye: "You have to learn to fathom your way through a world of which you are frightened." How do the two "fathom their way" together? How do you fathom your way through life?
5. We originally think of Ray as inward, trapped within himself and unable to focus on others. Yet it turns out he is attuned to others in an unusual way. He's ever curious, once asking Ray, for instance, "what exactly people do, all day long, every day?" Find other examples of how Ray thinks about people or animals?
6. Ray says to One Eye: "I wish I’d been born with your capacity for wonder." Does Ray, by the story's end acquire that capacity, or has he had it all along? By the end of the book, have you felt wonder?
7. Talk about the quality of compassion, which stands at the center of this book. Start with the advertisement for One Eye, which asks for a "compassionate and tolerant owner." Where else does compassion come into play...and importantly, where (or in whom) is it missing?
8. Baume's use of the second-person narrative is unusual. Why might the author have chosen that point of view? What does it allow her to do? What affect does it have you how you read the work?
9. Spill Simmer Falter Wither is heartrending. Does it leave any space for hope?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime use these, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Jane Steele
Lyndsay Faye, 2016
Penguin Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399169496
Summary
A reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer, from the author whose work the New York Times described as "riveting" and the Wall Street Journal called "thrilling."
Reader, I murdered him.
A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her.
After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre "last confessions" of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.
Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito, and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend.
As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past?
A satirical romance about identity, guilt, goodness, and the nature of lies, by a writer who Matthew Pearl calls "superstar-caliber" and whose previous works Gillian Flynn declared "spectacular," Jane Steele is a brilliant and deeply absorbing book inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1980
• Raised—Pacific Northwest, USA
• Education—B.A., Notre Dame de Namur University
• Currently—lives in Ridgewood, Queens, New York City
Lyndsay Faye is the American author of several crime novels with an historical-fiction bent. She was born in Northern California, raised in the Pacific Northwest, and graduated from Notre Dame de Namur University in the San Francisco Bay Area with a dual degree in English and Performance.
Her early career kept her in the Bay Area working as a professional actress, "nearly always," she says, "in a corset, and if not a corset then… heels and lined stockings." In 2005 she made the move to Manhattan to audition for acting jobs, working in a restaurant as her day job...until it was bulldozed to the ground by developers.
Novels
Sans restaurant job, and with more time on her hands, an initial foray into writing payed off. In 2009 Faye published her first novel, Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson. The book pays tribute to Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson, the duo whose adventures first captivated Faye as a child.
Faye's innate curiosity next spurred her to delve into the history of the New York Police Department, by which she learned that the department's founding coincided with the Irish Potato Famine in 1845. That research inspired her three Timothy Wilde novels—The Gods of Gotham (2012), Seven for a Secret (2013), and The Fatal Flame (2015). The novels follow ex-bartender Timothy Wilde as he learns the perils of police work in a violent and racially divided city during the pre-Civil War era.
Her next novel Jane Steele, released in 2016, re-imagines Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer who battles for justice with methods inspired by Darkly Dreaming Dexter.
Faye has been nominated for an Edgar Award, a Dilys Winn Award, and is honored to have been selected by the American Library Association's RUSA Reader's List for Best Historical. She is an international bestseller and her Timothy Wilde Trilogy has been translated into 14 languages.
Lyndsay and her husband Gabriel live in Ridgewood, Queens, a borough of New York. They have two cats, Grendel and Prufrock. She is a member of Actor’s Equity Association, the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes, the Baker Street Babes, the Baker Street Irregulars, Mystery Writers of America, and Girls Write Now. And always, she is hard at work on her next novel. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Jane Steele, an orphan turned governess, is a "murderess five times over." Perhaps more unforgivable, her crimes are wonderfully entertaining.... How can a serial killer also be a heroine? The answer lies in [Charlotte Bronte's words in the second edition of Jane Eyre:]...Conventionality is not morality....” Jane Steele adopts these words as her moral compass, slaying seemingly respectable villains who actually commit heinous deeds.
Abigail Meisel - New York Times
An entertaining riff on Jane Eyre.... [S]heer mayhem meets Victorian propriety.
USA Today
Jane Eyre gets a dose of Dexter. In a story that's equal parts romance, thriller, and satire, the Bronte heroine is made over into a fighter with a shadowy past.
Cosmopolitan
Set in Victorian England, this intriguing tribute to Jane Eyre from Edgar-finalist Faye reimagines Charlotte Brontë’s heroine as a killer.... The arresting narrative voice is coupled with a plot that Wilkie Collins fans will relish.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Young Jane Steele's favorite book, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, mirrors her life both too little and too much....In an arresting tale of dark humor and sometimes gory imagination, Faye has produced a heroine worthy of the gothic literature canon but reminiscent of detective fiction. —Jennifer Funk, McKendree Univ. Lib., Lebanon, IL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Faye’s skill at historical mystery was evident in her nineteenth-century New York trilogy, but this slyly satiric stand-alone takes her prowess to new levels. A must for Bronte devotees; wickedly entertaining for all.
Booklist
Each chapter begins with a short excerpt from Charlotte Bronte's work, and Jane's interpretation of the classic novel lifts her story out of standard romance and into conversations about identity, guilt, and truth.... A novel that explores great torment and small mercies.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Jane Steele sets out to write her confession, she says she is doing so because she is reading Jane Eyre, and the work inspires her to "imitative acts." Has a book ever directly inspired you to create something yourself? If so, was this when you were you a child or an adult?
2. From the beginning of the novel, Jane is threatened by men who pose a direct danger to her. If you are female, did you find this peril realistic or unrealistic? If you are male, did you think Jane’s vulnerability rang true, or did it seem like melodrama?
3. The sadistic-headmaster trope, here embodied by Vesalius Munt, was very popular in the Victorian era among social justice writers. At the time, children were expected to be silent, obedient, and hardworking. Children are treated very differently today. What do you think a Victorian childhood would have been like? How would it have affected you?
4. Jane is convinced from the day she kills her cousin that she is irredeemably evil. Do you agree with her that she "murdered" her cousin? Why or why not? Do you think Jane’s later murders would have occurred if she had never caused Edwin’s death?
5. When Jane discovers erotica, she is repulsed by Mr. Munt’s letters, but she greatly enjoys the book published by Clarke’s family in which consensual polyamorous relationships are explored. Do men and women experience the erotic differently? If so, in what ways?
6. Jane Steele and Clarke have a passionate friendship, one that eventually puts both their lives on the line. The theme of "best friends" is common in literature, for instance Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and Aibileen and Minny in The Help. Which friendships in fiction do you most identify with?
7. In London, Jane makes her living writing last confessions of the recently hanged. Many people are fascinated by the macabre; are you? Why or why not? Why are darkness and death such popular subjects when they are actually unpleasant topics?
8. Jane Steele enters the mysterious Gothic mansion thinking herself the owner, while Jane Eyre arrives as a governess. How does the power dynamic change the sorts of actions each of these characters takes after arriving? What are the biggest contrasts between Jane Steele and the character she loves? What are the greatest similarities?
9. Highgate House is full of mysteries—men with a dark past, unexpected and sinister visitors, and a forbidden cellar not unlike the forbidden attic in Jane Eyre. What is it we love about Gothic mansions? Can a house itself have secrets? A major component of the plot is the contested claim to Highgate House. In what ways may the property be considered a character?
10. Charles Thornfield and Edward Fairfax Rochester are both Byronic men plagued by their pasts, and yet they react to trauma in very different ways. In Jane Eyre, which lover is the pursuer, and which the pursued? What about in Jane Steele?
11. Sardar Singh is disgusted by the tragedy that befell his empire, and at one point he asks Jane which is worse, a rapist or a pimp—meaning the East India Company or the Sikh royalty who betrayed their country. How would you answer his question? In what ways has Sardar turned his back on his culture, and in what ways does he still cherish it?
12. There are many types of love in this novel—among others, the romantic love Jane feels for Mr. Thornfield, the unrequited love Clarke feels for Jane, the platonic love the asexual Mr. Singh feels for Mr. Thornfield. What other varieties of love are evident, and how do they drive the characters' actions? Which are the most compelling to you personally? Do you think making choices that are morally wrong is excusable if it is done for the sake of a loved one? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
Mona Awad, 2016
Penguin Books
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143128489
Summary
Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (a.k.a. Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks—even though her best friend Mel says she’s the pretty one.
She starts dating guys online, but she’s afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend China does her makeup: she knows no one would want her if they could really see her.
So she starts to lose
With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses. She grows up and gets thin, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, her friends, her husband, her reflection in the mirror.
But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?
In her brilliant, hilarious, and at times shocking debut, Mona Awad simultaneously skewers the body image-obsessed culture that tells women they have no value outside their physical appearance, and delivers a tender and moving depiction of a lovably difficult young woman whose life is hijacked by her struggle to conform.
As caustically funny as it is heartbreaking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl introduces a vital new voice in fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Mona Awad received her MFA in fiction from Brown University. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Walrus, Joyland, Post Road, St. Petersburg Review, and many other journals. She is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing and English literature at the University of Denver. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Simultaneously tart and tender, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is stunning.... The way food and body image define Elizabeth’s life is depressing and sad. But the book is neither. There is so much humor here—much of it dark, but spot on, like Dolores in Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone or Lena Dunham in Girls.... As you watch Lizzie navigate fraught relationships—with food, men, girlfriends, her parents and even with herself—you’ll want to grab a friend and say: "Whoa. This. Exactly."
Washington Post
Heartbreaking…[rife] with beauty and humor.... As addictive as potato chips and as painful as the prospect of eating nothing but 4-ounce portions of steamed fish for the rest of your life.
Chicago Tribune
Awad explores the sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking ways that a person’s struggle with body image can seep into every part of her existence.... 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is not really about how Lizzie March looks…[it's] about how she sees herself.
Wall Street Journal
Awad is an incredibly skilled writer, with a rare ability to construct tiny moments of both acute empathy and astonishing depth…and] a profoundly sensitive understanding of the subject matter.... It’s impossible not to be deeply affected by [her] prose.... A real narrative achievement.
Globe and Mail (Canada)
Absorbing…. Subtle but poignant.... This sort of intrafeminine aggression will be familiar to most women, whatever side of the body war they’ve been on. But it is is a side of experience that hasn’t been much explored by literary novelists.
Guardian (UK)
With dark humor and heartbreaking honesty, Awad cuts away at diet culture and the pressure on women to make thinness and beauty their priority.
San Francisco Chronicle
Awad’s satiric edge is on display in her debut novel.
Los Angeles Times
It's as if the writer has eavesdropped on your most pathetic, smallest thoughts.... Awad's writing is heartbreaking and witty, while her prose is insightful and sharp-elbowed in its caustic edge.... [Lizzie is] a vulnerable, funny and fierce narrator.
Salt Lake Tribune
[Lizzie's struggle] is a valuable addition to the canon of American womanhood.
Time
In this dark, honest debut, Awad sharply observes…the struggles of growing up, growing out, and trying to slim down, at any cost.
Marie Claire
The nuance Awad adds to conceptions of weight and body image is applied also to her realizations of female friendships. Lizzie’s relationships with other women are at once petty and kind, jealous and admiring.
Huffington Post
[A]ssured and terrific.... Awad artfully revisits themes related to body mass, femininity, cultural values, and resistance, finding virtually no reasons to be optimistic.... Lizzie’s witticisms, while abundant, are…a profoundly somber indictment of…gendered cultural norms.
Publishers Weekly
Touching.... Behind the title of Awad’s sharp first book, a unique novel in 13 vignettes, is brazen-voiced Lizzie, who longs for, tests, and prods the deep center of the cultural promise that thinness, no matter how one achieves it, is the prerequisite for happiness.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [P]ainfully raw—and bitingly funny.... [I]n Lizzie, Awad has created a character too vivid, too complicated, and too fundamentally human to be reduced to a single moral. Lizzie…gets under your skin, and she stays there. Beautifully constructed; a devastating novel but also a deeply empathetic one.
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 start a discussion for 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl...then take off on your own:
1. Did 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl make you laugh or cry...or both? What specific passages/chapters do you find humorous or painful? Which ones make you angry?
2. What is the picture Mona Awad paints of society's obsession with body shape? What is acceptably thin according to social current norms? Can one ever be "thin enough"? What does she have to say about other women's attitudes, clothing sizes (Addition Elle), even the regime of gym sign-up sheets?
3. How does Lizzie see herself? Do you relate to her struggle? In other words, are you overweight...maybe just a tad? How 'bout those five extra lbs? They could probably come off, right? Do you feel the societal pressure on women to look good?
4. Young Lizzie tells us, "Later on I'm going to be really f------ beautiful.... I'll be hungry and angry all my life but I'll also have a hell of a time." By the final story, Lizzie has transformed herself. In what way does her achievement feel less than wonderful?
5. In one story, Lizzie and Mel agree with one another that "the universe is against us, which makes sense." Why does it make sense?
In the very next breath, Lizzie says that she and Mel "get another McFlurry and talk about how fat we are for a while." Given the prior statement, does that make sense? Why would the two indulge in the very thing that puts them in in opposition to "the universe"? Do you understand why they turn to more food?
6. At some point, Lizzie reflects on her relationship with her overweight mother. How does she think her mother affected her sense of self?
7. Consider doing some research on the current science of obesity, particularly and the role that hormones play in signalling appetite and satiety (ghrelin and leptin, for instance). How do Awad's stories about Lizzie's struggle for thinness dovetail with the new (or not so new) understanding of obesity?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use these, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Find Her (Detective D.D. Warren, 8)
Lisa Gardner, 2016
Penguin Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525954576
Summary
Flora Dane is a victim.
Seven years ago, carefree college student Flora was kidnapped while on spring break. For 472 days, Flora learned just how much one person can endure.
Flora Dane is a survivor.
Miraculously alive after her ordeal, Flora has spent the past five years reacquainting herself with the rhythms of normal life, working with her FBI victim advocate, Samuel Keynes. She has a mother who’s never stopped loving her, a brother who is scared of the person she’s become, and a bedroom wall covered with photos of other girls who’ve never made it home.
Flora Dane is reckless.
. . . or is she? When Boston detective D. D. Warren is called to the scene of a crime—a dead man and the bound, naked woman who killed him—she learns that Flora has tangled with three other suspects since her return to society. Is Flora a victim or a vigilante? And with her firsthand knowledge of criminal behavior, could she hold the key to rescuing a missing college student whose abduction has rocked Boston?
When Flora herself disappears, D.D. realizes a far more sinister predator is out there. One who’s determined that this time, Flora Dane will never escape. And now it is all up to D. D. Warren to find her. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• AKA—Alicia Scott
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Where—Hillsboro, Oregon, USA
• Education—University of Pennsylvania
• Awards—Best Hardcove (Int'l. Thriller Writers); France's Grand Prix des lectrices
de Elle, prix du policie; Daphne du Maurier Award (Romances Writers of America)
• Currently—lives in New Hampshire
Lisa Gardner is an American author of fiction. She is the author of 30 some novels, including thriller-suspense works such as The Killing Hour, The Next Accident, Catch Me, and most recently Find Her. She also has written romance novels using the pseudonym Alicia Scott. With over 22 million books in print, Lisa is published in 30 countries. Four of her novels have been adapted as TV movies.
Her work as a research analyst for a consulting firm spurred her interest in police procedure, cutting edge forensics and twisted plots—a fascination she parlayed into more than 16 bestselling suspense novels.
Raised in Hillsboro, Oregon, she graduated from the city's Glencoe High School. As of 2007, Gardner lives in New Hampshire. (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Lisa Gardner is the master of the psychological thriller…The world of the FBI, the terror of abduction and victim advocates blend into this tense…thriller.
Associated Press
You'll read Find Her for its adrenaline-charged plot. You'll remember it for its insights into trauma and forgiveness.
Oprah.com
The line between mysteries and thrillers and so-called literary fiction has always been a thin one, but contemporary writers like Lisa Gardner make that sort of arbitrary distinction seem especially foolish…. Find Her...is a taut, brilliantly constructed look at the same sort of horrific situation that powered Emma Donoghue’s Room.
Connecticut Post
Gardner is known for creating complex, fascinating characters...This is an incredible story
Romance Times Book Reviews
When it comes to author Lisa Gardner, the tales she writes are always extreme gems in the literary world, and this is no exception.
Suspense Magazine
[C]ompelling.... [T]he reader is treated to fascinating insights into the psychology of sadistic sexual predators, trauma bonding, and the effects violent crime have on victims and loved ones.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Gardner doesn't disappoint. Longtime fans as well as those new to the series (there is no need to have read the other books in the series to enjoy this one) will delight in this suspenseful offering. —Cynthia Price, Francis Marion Univ. Lib., Florence, SC
Library Journal
Gardner alternates between Warren's investigation into Flora's disappearance and Flora's present-day hell..., but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity. A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Flora is trapped in Devon’s garage, she muses that "people saw what they wanted to see." Devon was more than just a bartender and Flora more than just another victim. Discuss how their social ruses both helped and hindered them.
2. Why do you think the author chose a fox as a recurring symbol throughout the novel? What do you think it symbolizes?
3. In her childhood, Flora’s mother tells her "Every creature must learn to make it on its own. Encouraging dependence doesn’t do anyone any favors." Why do you think such a mantra made an impression on Flora in her later life, and in what ways do you think she adopted it?
4. Discuss the role of victim advocates from the information provided in the book. What do you think their main function is, and who do you think they benefit the most?
5. Discuss the symbol of DR. Keynes’s shoes. Flora and Dr. Keynes call them a "symbol of civilization…a note of beauty and culture and care." What other interpretations can be made as to why Flora was so preoccupied with them when she first awoke in the hospital? How does clothing play into self-image and our perception of others?
6. How does D. D. Warren balance being a full time detective, a mother, and a wife? What would you say are her greatest strengths and weaknesses in both her professional and personal life?
7. Discuss Flora’s relationship with her mother. How do you think it will improve or degrade after the events of the book? What about her relationship with her brother?
8. When Stacey Summers’s father calls Detective D. D. Warren, she tries not to give him too much information. When Flora is missing the first time, her mother is also not privy to the investigation. Despite the risks involved, do you agree with how missing person’s cases are handled in this book? Where should there be boundaries in notifying family members of details in the investigation?
9. At times Flora imagines Jacob laughing or mocking her from beyond the grave. Why do you think he’s become such a large part of her conscience so many years after she was rescued? Discuss the relationship dynamics between victims and their captors.
10. What is the significance of Flora giving up her father’s name to Jacob? Why do you think this was one of the final straws in Flora giving up her identity?
11. Do you think Flora is justified in becoming a vigilante given everything she has gone through?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Under the Influence
Joyce Maynard, 2016
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062257642
Summary
A poignant story about the true meaning—and the true price—of friendship.
Drinking cost Helen her marriage and custody of her seven-year-old son, Ollie. Once an aspiring art photographer, she now makes ends meet taking portraits of school children and working for a caterer.
Recovering from her addiction, she spends lonely evenings checking out profiles on an online dating site. Weekend visits with her son are awkward. He’s drifting away from her, fast.
When she meets Ava and Swift Havilland, the vulnerable Helen is instantly enchanted. Wealthy, connected philanthropists, they have their own charity devoted to rescuing dogs. Their home is filled with fabulous friends, edgy art, and dazzling parties.
Then Helen meets Elliott, a kind, quiet accountant who offers loyalty and love with none of her newfound friends’ fireworks. To Swift and Ava, he’s boring. But even worse than that, he’s unimpressed by them.
As Helen increasingly falls under the Havillands’ influence—running errands, doing random chores, questioning her relationship with Elliott—Ava and Swift hold out the most seductive gift: their influence and help to regain custody of her son. But the debt Helen owes them is about to come due.
Ollie witnesses an accident involving Swift, his grown son, and the daughter of the Havillands’ housekeeper. With her young son’s future in the balance, Helen must choose between the truth and the friends who have given her everything. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 5, 1953
• Where—Durham, New Hampshire, USA
• Education—Yale University (no degree)
• Currently—lives in Mill Valley, California
Daphne Joyce Maynard is an American author known for writing with candor about her life, as well as for her works of fiction and hundreds of essays and newspaper columns, often about parenting and family. The 1998 publication of her memoir, At Home in the World, made her the object of intense criticism among some members of the literary world for having revealed the story of the relationship she had with author J. D. Salinger when he was 53 and she was 18.
Early life
Maynard grew up in Durham, New Hampshire, daughter of the Canadian painter Max Maynard and writer Fredelle Maynard. Her mother was Jewish (daughter of Russian-born immigrants) and her father was Christian. She attended the Oyster River School District and Phillips Exeter Academy. She won early recognition for her writing from The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, winning student writing prizes in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, and 1971.
While in her teens, she wrote regularly for Seventeen magazine. She entered Yale University in 1971 and sent a collection of her writings to the editors of the New York Times Magazine. They asked her to write an article for them, which was published as "An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life" in the magazine's April 23, 1972 issue.
J.D. Salinger
The Times Magazine article prompted a letter from J. D. Salinger, then 53 years old, who complimented her writing and warned her of the dangers of publicity.They exchanged 25 letters, and Maynard dropped out of Yale the summer after her freshman year to live with Salinger in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Maynard spent ten months living in Salinger's Cornish home, during which time she completed work on her first book, Looking Back, a memoir that was published in 1973, in which she adhered to Salinger's request that she not mention his role in her life. Her relationship with Salinger ended abruptly just prior to the book's publication. According to Maynard's memoir, he cut off the relationship suddenly while on a family vacation with her and with his two children; she was devastated and begged him to take her back.
For many years, Maynard chose not to discuss her affair with Salinger in any of her writings, but she broke her silence in At Home In the World, a 1999 memoir. The same year, Maynard put up for auction the letters Salinger had written to her. In the ensuing controversy over her decision, Maynard claimed that she was forced to auction the letters for financial reasons, including the need to pay her children's college fees; she would have preferred to donate them to Beinecke Library. Software developer Peter Norton bought the letters for $156,500 and announced his intention to return them to Salinger.
In September, 2013, Maynard wrote a New York Times opinion piece following the release of a documentary film on Salinger. She criticizes the film's hands-off attitude toward Salinger's numerous relationships with teenage girls.Now comes the word...
[that] Salinger was also carrying on relationships with young women 15, and in my case, 35 years younger than he. "Salinger" touches—though politely—on the story of just five of these young women (most under 20 when he sought them out), but the pattern was wider: letters I’ve received...revealed to me that there were more than a dozen.
Mid-career
Maynard never returned to college. In 1973, she used the proceeds from her first book to purchase a house on a large piece of land in Hillsborough, New Hampshire, where she lived alone for over two years. From 1973 until 1975, she contributed commentaries to a series called “Spectrum,” broadcast on CBS radio and television, frequently debating the conservative voices of Phyllis Schlafly and James J. Kilpatrick.
In 1975, Maynard joined the staff of the New York Times, where she worked as a general assignment reporter also contributing feature stories. She left the Times in 1977 when she married Steve Bethel and returned to New Hampshire, where the couple had three children.
From 1984 to 1990, Maynard wrote the weekly syndicated column “Domestic Affairs,” in which she wrote candidly about marriage, parenthood and family life. She also served as a book reviewer and a columnist for Mademoiselle and Harrowsmith magazines. She published her first novel, Baby Love, and two children’s books illustrated by her son Bethel. In 1986 she co-led the opposition to the construction of the nation’s first high-level nuclear waste dump in her home state of New Hampshire, a campaign she described in a New York Times cover story in April ,1986.
When Maynard’s own marriage ended in 1989—an event she explored in print—many newspapers dropped the “Domestic Affairs” column, though it was reinstated in a number of markets in response to reader protest. After her divorce, Maynard and her children moved to the city of Keene, New Hampshire.
Mature works
Maynard gained widespread commercial acceptance in 1992 with the publication of her novel To Die For which drew several elements from the real-life Pamela Smart murder case. It was adapted into a 1995 film of the same name starring Nicole Kidman, Matt Dillon, Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck and directed by Gus Van Sant. In the late 1990s, Maynard became one of the first authors to communicate daily with her readership by making use of the Internet and an online discussion forum, The Domestic Affairs Message Board (DAMB).
Maynard has subsequently published in several genres. Both The Usual Rules (2003) and The Cloud Chamber (2005) are young adult titles. Internal Combustion (2006), was her first in the true crime genre. Although nonfiction, it had thematic similarities to the fictionalized crime in To Die For, dealing with the case of Michigan resident Nancy Seaman, convicted of killing her husband in 2004. Labor Day, an adult literary novel, was published in 2009 and is presently being adapted for a film to be directed by Jason Reitman. Maynard's most recent novels are The Good Daughters, published in 2010, and After Her, in 2013.
Maynard and her sister Rona (also a writer and the retired editor of Chatelaine) collaborated in 2007 on an examination of their sisterhood. Rona Maynard's memoir My Mother's Daughter was published in the fall of 2007.
Recent years
Maynard has lived in Mill Valley, California, since 1996. She was an adjunct professor at the University of Southern Maine and now runs writing workshops at Lake Atitlan, Guatemala.
In February 2010, Maynard adopted two Ethiopian girls, Almaz (10) and Birtukan, but in the spring of 2011, she announced to friends and family that she no longer felt she could care for the girls. She sent the girls to live with a family in Wyoming and, citing their privacy, removed all references to them from her website. On July 6, 2013, she married a lawyer, Jim Barringer. (Adapted fom Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/15/13.)
Book Reviews
Maynard’s latest is illuminating and mesmerizing, highlighting not only differing definitions of friendship, but the shades of gray between right and wrong and the lengths to which some will go to protect their self-interest.
Publishers Weekly
When Ava and Swift Havilland waltz into Helen's life, she's at a low point and is immediately drawn to their easy friendship and overflowing generosity.... Maynard quietly portrays Helen's journey of self-discovery. Her story, though told with great foreboding, is less sinister in the final analysis, but readers will keep reading nonetheless. —Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA
Library Journal
Helen, a struggling divorcee who's lost custody of her son after a drunken driving arrest, is befriended by a wealthy couple at an art opening.... But the Havillands' glow is soon to dim.... [I]t's clear that a very big reversal lies in wait. Maynard's expert narration and plotting plant the seeds for the explosive events at the end of her tale.
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 start a discussion for Under the Influence...then take off on your own:
1. Talk about Helen. In what state of mind is she when readers first meet her? Are you sympathetic toward her? Clearly, she is prone to making bad decisions—do you find her not infrequent lapses of judgment irritating...or understandable?
2. Talk about the widening gap in the relationship between Helen and Ollie? Is it inevitable that their visits would become awkward? Where Dwight in all of this, and what about his new wife Cheri?
3. What was your first impression of the Havillands, both Avis and Swift? And at what did you begin to feel uneasy about them?
4. Talk about the degree to which Helen falls "under the influence" of the Havillands? What were your feelings when she began to run errands and do chores for them? What in Helen's personality makes her susceptible to the attentions, and demands, of Ava and Swift?
SPOILER ALERT from here
5. What do you make of Elliot and his attentions to Helen? What sparks his suspicions of the Havillands?
6. We know from the start that something will go amiss in the relationship between Helen and the Havillands. Why might the author have structured her book this way? What affect does it have on your reading experience? What if Maynard hadn't telescoped the troubled friendship?
7. Once the accident happens, what would you have done in Helen's place? Did she make the right or wrong decision?
8. We you surprised by the turn the plot took by the end?
9. Does this book play into the idea of female victimhood? Yes? No? Possibly?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use these, online or off with attribution. Thanks.)