Dog-Head: Tales from the Neotropics: Three Fictions
Michael Jarvis, 2015
Field of Vision Books
356 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780988538955
Summary
From a Caribbean island and the pursuit of a legendary boa constrictor, to the Belizean jungle and a fixation on the demise of the Maya civilization, to the Gulf of Honduras and a journey into ancestor worship, these tropical stories blend and explore history, religion, mythology, travel, mystery, illness, the nature of man, the nature of the beast, obsession, and the lure of discovery.
In "Dog-Head," a rejected man on an island holiday sets out to capture a large snake despite his lack of experience or the fear the legendary reptile inspires in the local people.
In "Remnants," a young couple on a Central American diving trip encounters a charismatic stranger whose intense obsession with the Maya civilization drives a wedge between them.
In "Moho Bight," an injured American fisherman in Belize, grappling with a new state of mind, becomes involved with a local woman whose mysterious illness leads him to a remote village and into the tribal rituals of the Garifuna culture.
In each of these three fictions, travel and obsession mix into new forms that propel and endanger those susceptible to the lure of the exotic and the unknown, taking the reader with them into uncharted territory. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 13, 1954
• Where—Montgomery, Alabama, USA
• Raised—moved regularly with military family
• Education—B.A., B.F.A,, Florida International University
• Currently—lives in Miami, Florida
Michael Jarvis was born on Maxwell Air Force Base and traveled regularly, living as a child in Alabama, Texas, Ohio, Guam, Georgia, and England.
He graduated from Florida International University with degrees in English and Fine Arts.
Since the mid 80s and beginning with the television series Miami Vice, he has been scouting locations for various films, shows, and commercials.
He travels for work, research, and pleasure, and has explored parts of the Caribbean, North, Central & South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
His short story, "American Kestrel," was published in The Secret of Salt: An Indigenous Journal (Key West, 2008) and will be included in a collection scheduled for release in 2017. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Michael on Facebook.
Book Reviews
This is an extraordinary collection of three novellas all centered on themes of obsession, myth, and exoticism. They are each mesmerizing, beautifully written, and wholly immersive, presenting the reader with intimate glimpses of little-seen worlds.
Locations are left relatively vague, as the stories are more often told from the point of view of the white outsider; the author is aware of the ways a tourist’s expectations of savage jungles and down-to-earth natives can color lived experiences, but his locals are just as aware of this exchange, which leads to excellent tension. The stories build their worlds slowly and then snap the reader out of reverie with quick plot changes and dramatic conclusions.
IR Verdict: Dog-Head: Tales from the Neotropics is a striking and viscerally immersive exploration of island culture and white tourism, man’s obsession with conquering nature, and the power of mythology.
IndieReader Review
Discussion Questions
1. What does the snake represent to the protagonist, Harlan Rivers, in "Dog-Head"?
2. In "Remnants," what do the religious elements have in common with Ben’s selfish actions?
3. What are some of the parallels between the Mayan belief system and Christianity?
4. In "Moho Bight," how are environmental concerns contrasted with the sporting life?
5. Why does Reese try to participate in the Garifuna rituals?
6. How does the underwater figure of the manatee serve the psychological aspect of the story?
7. How are the three stories linked thematically?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours: Stories
Helen Oyeyemi, 2016
Penguin Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634635
Summary
An enchanting collection of intertwined stories.
Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical.
The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret—Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side.
♦ In “Books and Roses” one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers’ fates.
♦ In “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school.
♦ “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea” involves a “house of locks,” where doors can be closed only with a key—with surprising, unobservable developments.
♦ In “If a Book Is Locked There’s Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,” a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 10, 1984
• Where—Nigeria
• Raised—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A. Cambridge University
• Awards—Somerset Maughm Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi is a British author with five novels to her name. She was born in Nigeria and raised in London, England.
Oyeyemi studied Social and Political Sciences at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, graduating in 2006. While at Cambridge, two of her plays, Juniper's Whitening and Victimese, were performed by fellow students to critical acclaim and subsequently published by Methuen.
Novels
She wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl, while still at school studying for her A levels at Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School.
In 2007 Bloomsbury published her second novel, The Opposite House which is inspired by Cuban mythology.
Her third novel, White is for Witching, described as having "roots in Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe" was published in 2009. It was a 2009 Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a 2010 Somerset Maugham Award.
Mr Fox, Oyeyemi's fourth novel was published in 2011. Aimee Bender said in a New York Times review: "Charm is a quality that overflows in this novel." Kirkus Reviews, however thought that while readers might consider Mr. Fox "an intellectual tour de force," they might also find it "emotionally chilly."
Oyeyemi's fith novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, published in 2014, is a retelling of Snow White, set in Massachusetts in the 1950s.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, released in 2016, is a collection of intertwined stories, all involving locks and keys.
Extras
• Oyeyemi is a lifelong Catholic who has done voluntary work for CAFOD in Kenya.
• In 2009 Oyeyemi was recognised as one of the women on Venus Zine’s “25 under 25” list.
(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/18/2014.)
Book Reviews
Summarizing Oyeyemi is like trying to tell a dream.... Casual and accessible at the sentence level, [these stories] are not so much experimental as deeply comfortable with the pre-narrative and proto-narrative impulses at the heart of storytelling.
Chicago Tribune
Magical and show stopping.
Elle.com
An enchanting and beautifully crafted first collection of stories, linked by the recurrence of keys…Oyeyemi’s storytelling is without parallel.
BBC.com
In this collection of short stories, there are many keys that unlock many things. . . What links them all? You’ll want to open and see.
Cosmopolitan
These modern fairy tales from award-winning author Helen Oyeyemi…will unlock your imagination with stories of love, loss, and...keys...magical, feverish, spooky, and delightful.
Marie Claire
Helen Oyeyemi is a literary genius, and it shows in this fantastic collection of short stories.... With characters that will welcome you, push you, and surprise you, Oyeyemi's writing takes you past your expectations.
Bustle
In her first story collection, Oyeyemi conjures present-day Europe, made enticingly strange by undercurrents of magic, and populated by ghosts, sentient puppets, and possible witches alongside middle-aged psychiatrists, tyrants, and feminist undergrads.
Publishers Weekly
The prolific and immensely talented Oyeyemi presents fantastical short stories that all revolve around a key, whether literal or metaphorical.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) These nine casually interlocking stories, set in a familiar yet surreal contemporary world, overflow with the cerebral humor and fantastical plots that readers have come to expect from Oyeyemi.... For all the portentous metaphors (keys and locks appear in every story) and all the convoluted and fabulist narrations, Oyeyemi's stories are often cheerfully sentimental.
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 What Is Yours Is Not Yours...then take off on your own:
1. First, what is your favorite story within the collection and why? Which is the most puzzling? Which is your least favorite?
2. Consider the title of each story and its meaning within the context of the story. Is the title thematic...or ironic?
3. The overriding metaphors within the collection are locks and keys. Whats role do they play in each story, and what is their symbolic significance?
4. In what way is "Dornicka and the St. Martin's Day Goose" an inverted "Little Red Riding Hood"? Do any of the other stories play with fairy tale themes? Consider, for instance, the way "Is Your Blood as Red as This?" draws on "Pinocchio."
5. Trace the characters who appear in multiple stories. How do they, or their roles, change from one story to the other?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
All Stories Are Love Stories
Elizabeth Percer, 2016
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062275950
Summary
In this thoughtful, mesmerizing tale, a group of survivors are thrown together in the aftermath of two major earthquakes that strike San Francisco within an hour of each other—an achingly beautiful and lyrical novel about the power of nature, the resilience of the human spirit, and the enduring strength of love.
On Valentine’s Day, two major earthquakes strike San Francisco within the same hour, devastating the city and its primary entry points, sparking fires throughout, and leaving its residents without power, gas, or water.
Among the disparate survivors whose fates will become intertwined are Max, a man who began the day with birthday celebrations tinged with regret; Vashti, a young woman who has already buried three of the people she loved most... but cannot forgot Max, the one man who got away; and Gene, a Stanford geologist who knows far too much about the terrifying earthquakes that have damaged this beautiful city and irrevocably changed the course of their lives.
As day turns to night and fires burn across the city, Max and Vashti—trapped beneath the rubble of the collapsed Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium—must confront each other and face the truth about their past, while Gene embarks on a frantic search through the realization of his worst nightmares to find his way back to his ailing lover and their home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974
• Where—Brookline, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Wellesley College; Ph.D., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Redwood Shores, California
Elizabeth Percer is an American novelist and poet. She has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and has twice been honored by the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation.
Her second novel, All Stories Are Love Stories, was published in 2016; her first, An Uncommon Education, came out in 2012. Ultrasound, a collection of poems was released in 2013.
Percer received a BA in English from Wellesley and a PhD in arts education from Stanford University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship for the National Writing Project at UC Berkeley. She lives in California with her husband and three children. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A]n unconventional love letter to San Francisco.... [The city’s] unique architecture, diverse neighborhoods, and colorful residents are vividly brought to life. The intertwined love stories in this remarkably drawn setting will keep readers absorbed until the final, tear-jerking moments.
Publishers Weekly
Percer imagine[s] a society suddenly upended. When two huge earthquakes hit San Francisco, Vashti finds herself trapped under the flattened Nob Hill Masonic Auditorium with Max, the man she couldn't have.
Library Journal
[T]the focus remains on character, in particular reassessment, repentance, forgiveness, and realignment. This intelligently written tale falls between genres, neither heart-racing disaster drama nor wrenching emotional excavation.
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 All Stories Are Love Stories:
1. Consider the significance of the date of the earth quake—a seismic event taking place on Valentine's Day.
2. What does the statement mean that San Francisco is "the best city America ever had the accidental luck to create." In what way is it "accidental luck"?
3. Talk about the title? Are all stories love stories? What does this novel have to say about the nature of love? What roles do redemption and forgiveness play in love?
4. What do we learn about the previous relationship between Max and Vashti? What happened 14 years ago, what has happened since, and what happens while the two are trapped during the quake? Do you sympathize with one more than the other?
5. How much to blame is Gene for failing to predict the quake?
6. What roles do families play in these love stories? How does family affect the relationships between Max and Vashti and between Gene and Franklin?
7. Was the novel's ending predictable? Are you satisfied with the way it ended?
8. Reviewers also see Percer's novel as a love story about San Francisco itself. Would you agree? Does All Stories Are Love Stories make you long for a trip to the city? Of if you live in the Bay Area, do the descriptions resonate with your own feelings about the city?
(Questions by LitLovers Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Innocents and Others
Dana Spiotta, 2016
Scribner
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501122729
Summary
A novel about aspiration, film, work, and love.
Dana Spiotta’s new novel is about two women, best friends, who grow up in LA in the '80s and become filmmakers.
Meadow and Carrie have everything in common—except their views on sex, power, movie-making, and morality. Their lives collide with Jelly, a loner whose most intimate experience is on the phone.
Jelly is older, erotic, and mysterious. She cold calls powerful men and seduces them not through sex but through listening. She invites them to reveal themselves, and they do.
Spiotta is “a wonderfully gifted writer with an uncanny feel for the absurdities and sadnesses of contemporary life, and an unerring ear for how people talk and try to cope today” (The New York Times). Innocents and Others is her greatest novel—wise, artful, and beautiful. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 16, 1966
• Where—state of New Jersey, USA
• Raised—Los Angeles, California
• Education—Evergreen State College
• Awards—finalist, National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Syracuse, New York
Dana Spiotta is the author of several novels: Innocents and Others (2016); Stone Arabia (2011), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document (2006), a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field (2001), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Spiotta was born in New Jersey, moving to and from various suburbs until her family settled in Los Angeles when she was 13. The city, especially its film industry, impressed itself on her and later became the setting, even the subject, of her novels.
She attended Columbia University for two years but dropped out during the chaotic period of her parents' divorce. To support herself, she headed to Seattle, Oregon, eventually enrolling at Evergreen State College where she studied labor history and creative writing.
On a whim almost, she and a friend cold-called a number in New York City—a number they found on the back of Quarterly, the literary journal. When its editor, the famed writer-editor Gordon Lish, happened to pick up the phone, the girls ended up being offered jobs as managing editors, and the two headed to New York. It was while working at Quarterly that Spiotta met Don DeLillo, who became both mentor and friend. (Years later, Spiotta was referred to as "DeLillo with a vagina," meant, it's utterer said, as a compliment.)
Her second novel Eat the Document (2006)—published while working at an upstate restaurant (which she and her then-husband owned)—brought her to the attention of writers and critics. She was offered a teaching position in the M.F.A. program at Syracuse University, where she remains today. Her colleagues include such notables as George Saunders and Mary Karr (who called her "whip smart and tirelessly generous").
Spiotta has been a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She lives in Syracuse with her daughter and her second husband. (Adapted from Wikipedia and New York Times. Retrieved 3/10/2016.)
Book Reviews
Ambitious.... Innocents and Others aims not only to use its characters’ experiences to open a window on American life in the late 20th century, but also to examine how technology has atomized contemporary life and the ways art mediates our relationships with friends and strangers. ...[S]harp, kinetic.... Ms. Spiotta writes about film with great knowledge and insight.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Such is the subtlety of Spiotta’s prose, and the diversity of its presentation (the book includes biographical essays, video transcripts, diary entries, online chats), that the reader can never be sure which, if any, meaning is intended as primary. Are we meant to discern a deconstructive critique, or merely a mockery of chick lit, in Spiotta’s portrayal of two smart female artists trying to honor their pasts while inventing their futures, all without judging each other to death? Or are we reading a philosophical novel, one that enacts the immemorial debate between art as entertainment (Carrie’s filmography) and art for art’s sake (Meadow’s)?
Joshua Cohen - New York Times Book Review
A brilliant split-screen view of women working within and without the world of Hollywood…. [I]lluminating….. Among chapters of conventional narration, Spiotta presents the transcript of an eight-hour interview...lists, descriptions of editing sessions, a filmography, online essays. Whatever the novel needs, it confidently shifts to embrace…its moral dimensions feel vast. Once Spiotta has her disparate storylines in motion, they resonate with each other in ways you can’t stop thinking about…. Spiotta explores the remarkable species of sisterhood that survives jealousy and disappointment and even years of neglect....nothing can blot out their shared history, their abiding devotion, the great wonder that is a true friend.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Enigmatic… fascinating… the need to connect, the desire for intimacy and friendship, and the quest for meaning in our lives are at the heart of this complex and compelling book… Spiotta is asking big, interesting, questions here. Without consciousness, without an inward operator, what are we connecting to? To art? To nature? To something divine?.... It is worth mentioning that in the structure of the novel, Spiotta is playing with time and narrative, jumping freely between story lines, to create a unique vibe that buzzes in your subconscious…. These dual (or triple) parallel threads intersect only briefly but with consequences that deliver a surprising wallop of emotion…. It's difficult not to descend into hyperbole talking about Spiotta's work. She writes with a breezy precision and genuine wit that put her on a short list of brilliant North American novelists who deserve a much wider audience…. And it's rare to find a novel that is so much fun and, at the same time, seeks emotional truth with such intellectual rigor; it adds up to an original and strangely moving book.
Mark Haskell Smith - Los Angeles Times
Haunting…[Meadow’s] story serves as the intellectual fulcrum of this intimate, unsettling novel, but Jelly provides its emotional heart.
Claudia Rowe - Seattle Times
A female critic may have been impolitic in calling Spiotta "DeLillo with a vagina"; more to the point, she’s DeLillo with a heart (or a stronger one, at least). Innocents and Others is both lean and capacious. Revolving around a documentary filmmaker, her rocky friendship with a more commercial director, and one of her subjects—a sympathetic con artist who catfishes powerful men over the phone—Innocents and Others uses both traditional narration and ‘found’ documents to build a sort of mixed-media meditation on alienation, friendship, technology, and the senses of hearing and sight.
Boris Kachka - New York Magazine
A thrillingly complex and emotionally astute novel about fame, power, and alienation steeped in a dark eroticism and a particularly American kind of loneliness.
Elissa Schappell - Vanity Fair
The visionary liberty and daring with which Dana Spiotta has crafted her brilliant new novel Innocents and Others is both inspirational and infectious. At its heart is a cinematic tale of friendship, obsession, morality, and creativity between best-friend filmmakers Carrie Wexler and Meadow Mori….over time, Meadow’s ‘penchant for failures, [her] soft spot for them’ and Carrie’s commercial success will test their bond to the max…original and seductive…with Innocents and Others, [Spiotta] delivers a tale about female friendship, the limits of love and work, and costs of claiming your right to celebrate your triumphs and own your mistakes.
Lisa Shea - Elle
Impossible to put down.
Steph Optiz - Marie Claire
Dana Spiotta’s whip-smart Innocents and Others maps the unexpected confluence of two rising feminist filmmakers and a movie buff who, posing as a film student, seduces Hollywood men over the phone, simply by listening to them.
Marnie Hanel - W
Brilliant…masterful…Recalling a younger, warmer DeLillo, Spiotta reminds us that the cinema is where America fears and desires have long been projected, the small-town theater an abandoned temple of shared dreams. At the same time, she nails a devastating irony: The more reachable we are, the more screens infiltrate our lives, the less there is that genuinely connects us.
Megan O’Grady - Vogue
Eschewing linear storytelling in favor of chapters interspersed with scene and interview transcripts and paragraphs of film theory, Spiotta delivers a patchwork portrait of two women on the verge of two very different nervous breakdowns. True to form, the effect is like watching raw footage before it’s been edited—sometimes moving, often disjointed, always thought provoking.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [E]nsnaring, sly, and fiercely intelligent.... A novel for readers thrilled by Jennifer Egan, Siri Hustvedt, Rachel Kushner, and Claire Messud, Spiotta’s deeply inquiring tale is about looking and listening, freedom and obligation, our dire hunger for illusion, and our profound need for friendship. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
(Starred review.) The complex relationship among three women and the film world drives this tale of technology and its discontents.... [Spiotta] finds something miraculous in how technology can reveal us to ourselves.... A superb, spiky exploration of artistic motivation.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available. In the meantime use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Innocents and Others...then take off on your own:
1. "This is a love story," reads the opening line of Innocents and Others. How does that line apply to the novel as a whole? What is meant by the term "love"? Does it refer to intimacy or friendship or obsession...or something else?
2. The book opens with Meadow, one of the main characters, lying about an affair with Orson Welles. Why does Meadow fabricate the relationship? And why might Dana Spiotta have chosen to open her novel with a lie?
3. Talk about Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler. How are they different from one another? Consider their childhood backgrounds, as well as the choices they made in their personal and professional lives.
4. Follow-up to Question 3: Discuss the long-term friendship at the heart of the novel. How do Carrie's and Meadow's career paths strain their relationhip? What continues to bind them together?
5. Consider Meadow's reaction when she sees Carrie's new film—the "funniest film of the summer." After seeing it, Meadow wonders, "What was wrong with her? Why was she like this, so ungenerous?" Is Meadow normally "ungenerous"? She also wonders, "Why couldn't she be better?" Have you ever had similar concerns about how you react to friends' successes (or failures...schadenfreud, anyone)? Is resentment or jealousy part of human nature?
6. One of the concerns of the novel has to do with artistic integrity. Whose career path is more authentic...and whose is less? Is Carrie a sellout because her films appeal to popular audiences? Or in an industry—and a society—that rewards escapism, is Carrie's choice inevitable, even blameless? Has Meadow remained true to her goals? Or is she following her own egotistical drive for acclaim among the art house crowd?
7. Is Meadow's film "Inward Operator" a betrayal of Jelly, or even a betrayal of her own standards?
8. Talk about the hollowness at the heart of the lives of the three women in this novel: Carrie, Meadow, and Jelly. Why are their lives not more fulfilling?
9. What about Jelly, who finds intimacy through her "pure calls"? Jelly says, "I was always happy to reach an inward operator." What is an "inward operator"—and who else might be searching for one in this novel?
10. Meadow believes that people reveal themselves in front of a camera whether they intend to or not. Do you believe cameras have a revelatory quality to them? Can we come to know others, even ourselves, through the lens of a camera? If so, how does that happen? When you see yourself on video, or hear your voice on tape, have you ever been surprised at how you look and sound?
11. Dana Spiotta avoids straight forward, linear story telling; instead, she intersperses her narrative with interviews, scene transcripts, webpages, film theory dissertations, and more. What affect does this have on your reading of the book? Why might the author have chosen this interruptive mode?
12. This book is concerned about the impact of art on human consciousness. What is art's purpose or intent? Is it to entertain? Is it to enable us to see what we often overlook—about the world, about ourselves? What are your thoughts on how art affects us? When we view art (an image, say, on film or otherwise), what are we connecting with—art itself, nature, ourselves, or something transcendant and divine ?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Nest
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, 2016
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062414212
Summary
A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.
Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional.
Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger.
The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs' joint trust fund, “The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.
Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can’t seem to finish her overdue novel.
Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they’ve envisioned?
Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.
This is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down.
In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1960
• Raised—Rochester, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., St. Bonaventure University; M.F.A., Bennington Writing Seminars
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. She has an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars.
Previously, she lived and worked in New York City for more than two decades, writing copy for a variety of clients, including American Express, McDonald’s and more defunct Internet start-ups than she cares to count. Her non-fiction essays have been published in the New York Times Magazine and Martha Stewart Living. The Nest is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[f]our middle-aged Plumb siblings...await the distribution of the trust fund their father had established for them.... [Sweeney's] writing is assured, energetic, and adroitly plotted, sweeping the reader along through an engrossing narrative that endears readers to the Plumb family for their essential humanity.
Publishers Weekly
This anticipated debut novel...typifies the Internet meme "white people problems"..... Anyone with siblings will appreciate the character dynamics at play here, although they may not care much for each character individually. A fun, quick read recommended for fans of Emma Straub and Meg Wolitzer. —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Dysfunctional siblings in New York wig out when the eldest blows their shared inheritance.... A fetching debut from an author who knows her city, its people, and their hearts.
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 helps start a discussion for The Nest...then take off on your own:
1. Just how dysfunctional is the Plumb family...and why? Why do the siblings allow Leo to have such power over them? If you could advise any or all four of them, how would you counsel them about living their lives?
2. At the beginning of the book, each of the siblings has a drink at a Manhattan watering hole before meeting the others. What do those moments reveal about them?
3. Melodie, Beatrice, Jack and Leo all have behaved somewhat (or very) irresponsibly. Is there one of them with whom you sympathize more than the others? Or are they all caught up in a sense of their own entitlement?
4. How would you live your life if you knew you were to receive a fair amount of money down the line?
5. Talk, too, about the secondary characters and the roles they play in the story: grandchildren, Jack’s husband, Melody’s husband, Leo’s girlfriend, and Bea’s boss.
6. Ultimately, this book is about defining ourselves as individuals within a family (or even a career). How does each character learn who he or she is and what ultimately makes for a fulfilling life?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)