Can't Wait to Get to Heaven
Fannie Flagg, 2006
Random House
375 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345494887


Summary 
Combining southern warmth with unabashed emotion and side-splitting hilarity, Fannie Flagg takes readers back to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where the most unlikely and surprising experiences of a high-spirited octogenarian inspire a town to ponder the age-old question: Why are we here?

Life is the strangest thing. One minute, Mrs. Elner Shimfissle is up in her tree, picking figs, and the next thing she knows, she is off on an adventure she never dreamed of, running into people she never in a million years expected to meet. Meanwhile, back home, Elner’s nervous, high-strung niece Norma faints and winds up in bed with a cold rag on her head; Elner’s neighbor Verbena rushes immediately to the Bible; her truck driver friend, Luther Griggs, runs his eighteen-wheeler into a ditch–and the entire town is thrown for a loop and left wondering, “What is life all about, anyway?” Except for Tot Whooten, who owns Tot’s Tell It Like It Is Beauty Shop. Her main concern is that the end of the world might come before she can collect her social security.

In this comedy-mystery, those near and dear to Elner discover something wonderful: Heaven is actually right here, right now, with people you love, neighbors you help, friendships you keep. Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven is proof once more that Fannie Flagg “was put on this earth to write” (Southern Living), spinning tales as sweet and refreshing as iced tea on a summer day, with a little extra kick thrown in. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Real Name—Patricia Neal
• Birth—September 21, 1944
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—University of Alabama
• Currently—lives in Montecito, California

Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was produced by Universal Pictures as Fried Green Tomatoes), Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow, and A Redbird Christmas. Flagg’s script for Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for both the Academy and Writers Guild of America awards and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. Flagg lives in California and in Alabama.

Before her career as a novelist, Flagg was known principally for her on-screen television and film work. She was second banana to Allen Funt on the long-running Candid Camera, perhaps the trailblazer for the current crop of so-called reality television. (Her favorite segment, she told Entertainment Weekly in 1992, was driving a car through the wall of a drive-thru bank.) She appeared as the school nurse in the 1978 film version of Grease, and on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And she was a staple of the Match Game television game shows in the '70s.

Quite early on in her writing career, Fannie Flagg stumbled onto the holy grail of secrets in the publishing world: what editors are actually good for.

Attending the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference in 1978 to see her idol, Eudora Welty, Flagg won first prize in the writing contest for a short story told from the perspective of a 11-year-old girl, spelling mistakes and all—a literary device that she figured was ingenious because it disguised her own pitiful spelling, later determined to be an outgrowth of dyslexia. But when a Harper & Row editor approached her about expanding the story into a full-length novel, she realized the jig was up. In 1994 she told the New York Times:

I just burst into tears and said, 'I can't write a novel. I can't spell. I can't diagram a sentence.' He took my hand and said the most wonderful thing I've ever heard. He said, 'Oh, honey, what do you think editors are for?'

Writing
And so Fannie Flagg—television personality, Broadway star, film actress and six-time Miss Alabama contestant—became a novelist, delving into the Southern-fried, small-town fiction of the sort populated by colorful characters with homespun, no-nonsense observations. Characters that are known to say things like, "That catfish was so big the photograph alone weighed 40 pounds."

Her first novel, an expanded take on that prize-winning short story, was Coming Attractions: A Wonderful Novel, the story of a spunky yet hapless girl growing up in the South, helping her alcoholic father run the local bijou. But it was with her second novel where it all came together. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—a novel, for all its light humor, that infuses its story with serious threads on racism, feminism, spousal abuse and hints at Sapphic love -- follows two pairs of women: a couple running a hometown café in the Depression-era South and an elderly nursing home resident in the late 1980s who strikes up an impromptu friendship with a middle-aged housewife unhappy with her life.

The result was not only a smash novel, but a hit movie as well, one that garnered Flagg an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay. She won praise from the likes of Erma Bombeck, Harper Lee and idol Eudora Welty, and the Los Angeles Times critic compared it to The Last Picture Show. The New York Times called it, simply, "a real novel and a good one."

As a writer, though, this Birmingham, Alabama native found her voice as a chronicler of Southern Americana and life in its self-contained hamlets. "Fannie Flagg is the most shamelessly sentimental writer in America," The Christian Science Monitor wrote in a 1998 review of her third novel. "She's also the most entertaining. You'd have to be a stone to read Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! without laughing and crying. The cliches in this novel are deep-fat fried: not particularly nutritious, but entirely delicious."

The New York Times, also reviewing Baby Girl, took note of the spinning-yarns-on-the-front-porch quality to her work: "Even when she prattles—and she prattles a great deal during this book—you are always aware that a star is at work. She has that gift that certain people from the theater have, of never boring the audience. She keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along—and, most of all, she keeps it beloved."

But, lest she be pegged as simply a champion of the good ol’ days, it's worth noting that her writing can be something of a clarion call for social change. In Fried Green Tomatoes, Flagg comments not only on the racial divisions of the South but also on the minimization of women in both the 1930s and contemporary life. Just as Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison commit to a life together—without menfolk—in the Depression-era days of Whistle Stop, Alabama, middle-aged Evelyn Couch in modern-day Birmingham discovers the joys of working outside the home and defining her life outside meeting the every whim of her husband.

On top of her writing, Flagg has also stumped for the Equal Rights Amendment.

I think it's time that women have to stand up and say we do not want to be seen in a demeaning manner," Flagg told a Premiere magazine reporter in an interview about the film adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes.

Extras
• Flagg approximated the length of her first novel by weight. Her editor told her a novel should be around 400 pages. "So I weighed 400 pages and it came to two pounds and something," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. " I wrote until I had two pounds and something, and, as it happened, the novel was just about done."

• She landed the Candid Camera gig while a writer at a New York comedy club. When one of the performers couldn't go on, Flagg acted as understudy, and the show's host, Allen Funt, was in the audience.

• Flagg went undiagnosed for years as a dyslexic until a viewer casually mentioned it to her in a fan letter. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
You can't help but love this book. It's warm, funny, and at times a real belly-guffaw.....Eighty-something Elner Shimfissle falls off a ladder and lands in an emergency room, vascillating between this world and the next. Her death, or near death (which is it?), leads to a meditation for the living, what constitutes a good life? 
A LitLovers LitPick (Oct '07)


What saves this book from being more sugary than Neighbor Dorothy's Heavenly Caramel Cake is Flagg's unerring eye for human foibles.
Charlotte Hays - The Washington Post


(Audio version.) The only thing more enjoyable than reading a Fannie Flagg novel is having Flagg read it aloud herself. A born storyteller, Flagg is a marvelous reader with a warm, welcoming Alabama accent. She immediately puts listeners at ease, priming them for an engrossing yarn that will mix laugh-out-loud hilarity with unabashed sentiment in a novel as thoughtful as it is delightful. Returning to Elmwood Springs, Miss. (the setting of two previous novels), Flagg focuses on a handful of days following octogenarian Elner Shimfissle's fatal fall from a tree. As listeners check in on various residents in town to see how they're reacting to the news and remembering how their lives were touched by the old woman, Flagg alternates bite-size chapters detailing Elner's journey to the afterlife. Flagg completely embodies her delightful characters, adapting a slight vocal scratch for eternally optimistic Elner, a flatter drawl for the ever-complaining hairdresser Tot and a sweet innocence as Elner's hilariously nervous niece, Norma. An uplifting delight.
Publishers Weekly

Discussion Questions 
1. When Aunt Elner falls out of her fig tree, she embarks upon a journey she never could have anticipated. Describe Elner's surprising view of heaven. How does it compare with your own idea of the afterlife, or theconceptions held by various world cultures and religions? On a personal note, what do you hope is waiting for you on the other side of the pearly gates?

2. Elmwood Springs is a tightly knit community in which everyone seems to know his neighbor's business. For the Warrens, what are some of the benefits of living in a small town? On the other hand, what are some of the drawbacks? How does your own hometown compare with Elmood Springs? Would you ever wish to move into Elner's quirky neighborhood? Why or why not?

3. Describe Norma and Macky's relationship, and how their marriage grows throughout the course of the novel. What bumps in the road have the Warrens endured? What keeps their marriage strong?

4. On her ascent to heaven, Elner climbs a crystal staircase; meanwhile, Ernest Koontz drives up to destiny in a brand new Cadillac convertible with heated seats. Consider your own wildest fantasy about heaven; how would you choose to arrive in style?

5. Norma and Tot's long-standing friendship is challenged by Tot's persistent negativity. Do you, like Aunt Elner, naturally embrace a positive outlook on life? Or, like Norma, do you strive, day by day, to "replace a negative thought with a positive"? Or, like Tot, do you prefer to "tell it like it is"? How does Norma choose to handle her differences with Tot? And how do the two friends manage to reconcile in the end?

6. For Elner, meeting her hero, Thomas Edison, is a dream come true. Which figures from history would top your own list of people you'd like to meet in heaven?

7. What message does Raymond impart to Elner about the meaning of life, and how does this view compare with your own beliefs?

8. If heaven allowed you to re-experience an episode, a place, or a time from your past, like Aunt Elner's trip fifty years back in time to Neighbor Dorothy's on First Avenue North, what scene or event would you choose to revisit, and why?

9. Can't Wait to Get to Heaven is as much a mystery as a comedy. Do you think Elner truly died and went to heaven? What do members of Elner's family believe? Next, just what is the truth behind the strange golf shoe? And what about Ida's hidden family Bible? Finally, discuss the mystery of Elner's loaded gun; were you surprised at the truth behind the mystery?

10. Reading Can't Wait to Get to Heaven is like taking an antidote to the almost constant stream of bad news that surrounds us in our modern world. Tot voices something we all feel: "I always try to put on a happy face, but it's getting harder and harder to keep up a good attitude.....Nostradamus, CNN, all the papers, according to them, we are on the brink of total annihilation at any second." How did this novel make you feel about the state of the world today?

11. Elner touched the lives of many people in her community, from the ambitious journalist Cathy Calvert, to the troubled, misunderstood Luther Griggs, to the reformed lawyer Winston Sprague. How does Elner relate to so many different personalities? Describe Elner's character and attitude toward people, problems, and life. Do you know anyone who shares Elner's sensibility and talents for reaching out to others?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Canada 
Richard Ford, 2012
HarperCollins
420 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061692031


Summary
First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.

Then fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone.

A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of our greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a classic. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 16, 1944
• Where—Jackson, Mississippi, USA
• Education— B.A., Michigan State University; M.F.A.,
   University of California, Irvine
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize; PEN/Faulkner Award (more below)
• Currently—llives in Boothbay, Maine


Richard Ford is an American novelist and short story writer. His best-known works are the novel The Sportswriter and its sequels, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, and the short story collection Rock Springs, which contains several widely anthologized stories.

Early years
Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, the only son of Parker Carrol Ford, a traveling salesman for Faultless Starch, a Kansas City company. When Ford was eight years old, his father had a major heart attack, and thereafter Ford spent as much time with his grandfather, a former prizefighter and hotel owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, as he did with his parents. Ford's father died of a second heart attack in 1960.

Ford received a B.A. from Michigan State University. Having enrolled to study hotel management, he switched to English. After graduating he taught junior high school in Flint, Michigan, and enlisted in the US Marines but was discharged after contracting hepatitis. At the university he met Kristina Hensley, his future wife; the two married in 1968.

Despite mild dyslexia, Ford developed a serious interest in literature. He has said in interviews that his dyslexia may, in fact, have helped him as a reader, as it forced him to approach books at a slow and thoughtful pace.

Ford briefly attended law school but dropped out and entered the creative writing program at the University of California, Irvine, to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree, which he received in 1970. Ford chose this course simply because, he confesses...

they admitted me. I remember getting the application for Iowa, and thinking they'd never have let me in. I'm sure I was right about that, too. But, typical of me, I didn't know who was teaching at Irvine. I didn't know it was important to know such things. I wasn't the most curious of young men, even though I give myself credit for not letting that deter me.

As it turned out, Oakley Hall and E. L. Doctorow were teaching there, and Ford has been explicit about his debt to them. In 1971, he was selected for a three-year appointment in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.

Later life and works
Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, in 1976, and followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck in 1981. In the interim he briefly taught at Williams College and Princeton.

Despite good notices the books sold little, and Ford retired from fiction writing to become a writer for the magazine Inside Sports. Ford has said...

I realized there was probably a wide gulf between what I could do and what would succeed with readers. I felt that I'd had a chance to write two novels, and neither of them had really created much stir, so maybe I should find real employment, and earn my keep.

In 1982, the magazine folded, and when Sports Illustrated did not hire Ford, he returned to fiction writing with The Sportswriter, a novel about a failed novelist turned sportswriter who undergoes an emotional crisis following the death of his son. The novel became Ford's "breakout book", named one of Time magazine's five best books of 1986 and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Ford followed the success immediately with Rock Springs (1987), a story collection mostly set in Montana that includes some of his most popular stories, adding to his reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Although his 1990 novel Wildlife, a story of a Montana golf pro turned firefighter, met with mixed reviews and middling sales, by the end of the 1980s Ford's reputation was solid. He was increasingly sought after as an editor and contributor to various projects. Ford edited the 1990 Best American Short Stories, the 1992 Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the 1998 Granta Book of the American Long Story, a designation he claimed in the introduction to prefer to the novella. More recently he has edited the 2007 New Granta Book of the American Short Story, and the Library of America's two-volume edition of the selected works of fellow Mississippi writer Eudora Welty.

In 1995, Ford's career reached a high point with the release of Independence Day, a sequel to The Sportswriter, featuring the continued story of its protagonist, Frank Bascombe. Reviews were positive, and the novel became the first to win both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In the same year, Ford was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, for outstanding achievement in that genre. Ford's recent works include the story collections Women with Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002). The Lay of the Land (2006) ends the Frank Bascombe series. Ford's latest novel, Canada, was published in 2012.

Ford lived for many years in New Orleans, Louisiana, where his wife Kristina was the executive director of the city planning commission. He now lives in East Boothbay, Maine. He took up a teaching appointment at Bowdoin College in 2005, but remained in the post for only one semester. Since 2008 Ford has been Adjunct Professor at the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and teaches on the Masters programme in creative writing.

As of December 29, 2010, Ford will be assuming the post of senior fiction professor at the University of Mississippi in the Fall of 2011, replacing Barry Hannah, who died in March 2010.

 In the fall of 2012, he will become the Emmanuel Roman and Barrie Sardoff Professor of the Humanities and Professor of Writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Critical opinion
Richard Ford's writings demonstrate "a meticulous concern for the nuances of language ... [and] the rhythms of phrases and sentences." Ford has described his sense of language as "a source of pleasure in itself—all of its corporeal qualities, its syncopations, moods, sounds, the way things look on the page." This "devotion to language" is closely linked to what he calls "the fabric of affection that holds people close enough together to survive."

Comparisons have been drawn between Ford's work and the writings of John Updike, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Walker Percy. Ford himself resists such comparisons, commenting, "You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself."

Ford's works of fiction "dramatize the breakdown of such cultural institutions as marriage, family, and community," and his...

marginalized protagonists often typify the rootlessness and nameless longing ... pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now.

Ford "looks to art, rather than religion, to provide consolation and redemption in a chaotic time."

Awards and honors
    2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in fiction for Canada
    2001 PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction
    1995 PEN/Faulkner Award[8] for Independence Day
    1995 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[9] for Independence Day
    1995 Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement in that genre. (Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/07/2013.)

Book Reviews
Canada is blessed with two essential strengths in equal measure—a mesmerizing story driven by authentic and fully realized characters, and a prose style so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next…Dell's voice here—nonjudgmental, insightful, laconic and slightly melancholy but at ease with the language he's using to plumb his memory—is the central strength of this remarkable novel. Its finely wrought sentences alone are worth the price of admission, but they are also in constant service to the story of the Parsons family…Canada is a tale of what happens when we cross certain lines and can never go back. It is an examination of the redemptive power of articulated memory, and it is a masterwork by one of our finest writers working at the top of his form.
New York Times Book Review—Andre Dubus III


Mr. Ford has fashioned an engaging, ruminative voice for Dell. It's less self-conscious than that of the author's best-known hero, Frank Bascombe…but almost as elastic, capable of capturing the vernacular of the everyday, while addressing the big philosophical questions of choice and fate. It's a voice capable of conjuring both the soporific routines of daily life in 1960 in Great Falls, before Dell's parents turn to crime, and the harrowing, Dickensian experiences he is subjected to after their arrest.
New York Times—Michiko Kakutani


Robust and powerful… Ford is able to tap into something momentous and elemental about the profound moral chaos behind the actions of seemingly responsible people… Ford has dramatized the frightening discovery of the world’s anarchic heart.
Wall Sreet Journal


[A] magnificent work of Montana gothic that confirms [Ford's] position as one of the finest stylists and most humane storytellers in America…his most elegiac and profound book…Always a careful craftsman, Ford has polished the plainspoken lines of Canada to an arresting sheen. He's working somewhere between Marilynne Robinson (without the theology) and Cormac McCarthy (without the gore). The wisdom he offers throughout these pages can be heard in the hushed silence that follows this harrowing tale.
Washington Post—Ron Charles


Richard Ford returns with one of his most powerful novels yet…Ford has never written better…Canada is Richard Ford’s best book since Independence Day, and despite its robbery and killings it too depends on its voice, a voice oddly calm and marked by the spare grandeur of its landscape.
Daily Beast


Told in Ford’s exquisitely detailed, unhurried prose…Ford is interested here in the ways snap decisions can bend life in unexpected directions... Canada’s characters grapple with this... and the answers they come up with define the rest of their lives, along with this quietly thoughtful book.
Entertainment Weekly



Masterly… in Ford’s American tragedy, filled with lost innocence and inevitable violence—a rusting carnival, a rabbit caught in a coyote’s jaws—geography feels a lot like fate.
Vogue


Tragic rural farrago composed of two awkwardly joined halves. In the late 1950s, in Great Falls, Mont., teenage twins Dell and Berner Parson have different concerns: Berner’s is whether to run away with her boyfriend; Dell’s is chess and beekeeping. Their comically mismatched parents...in desperation...[rob] a bank... A book from Ford is always an event and his prose is assured and textured, but the whole is not heavily significant.
Publishers Weekly


Since winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1995 novel, Independence Day, Ford has cultivated a reputation for writing lucid and compelling prose. Here, he lives up to that reputation....[with] 15-year-old Dell Parsons, whose world collapses when his parents are jailed for a bank robbery.... Segmented into three parts, the narrative slowly builds into a gripping commentary on life's biggest question: Why are we here? Ford's latest work successfully expands our understanding of and sympathy for humankind. —Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH
Library Journal


Typically for Ford, the focus is as much on the perspective (and limitations) of its protagonist as it is on the issues that the narrative addresses. The first-person narrator is Dell Parsons, a 15-year-old living in Montana with his twin sister when their parents...bank robbery.... Dell is taken across the border to Canada, where he will establish a new life for himself after crossing another border, from innocent bystander to reluctant complicity.... Dell's perspective may well be singular and skewed, but it's articulate without being particularly perceptive or reflective.
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)

We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.

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Cancel the Wedding 
Carolyn T. Dingman, 2014
HarperCollins
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062276728


Summary
A heartfelt fiction debut that will appeal to fans of Emily Giffin’s Southern charm and Jennifer Weiner’s compelling, emotionally resonant novels about the frustrations of blood ties, Cancel the Wedding follows one woman’s journey to discover the secrets of her mother’s hidden past—and confront her own uncertain future.

On the surface, Olivia has it all: a high-powered career, a loving family, and a handsome fiance. She even seems to be coming to terms with her mother Jane’s premature death from cancer.

But when Jane’s final wish is revealed, Olivia and her elder sister Georgia are mystified. Their mother rarely spoke of her rural Southern hometown, and never went back to visit—so why does she want them to return to Huntley, Georgia, to scatter her ashes?

Jane’s request offers Olivia a temporary escape from the reality she’s long been denying: she hates her “dream” job, and she’s not really sure she wants to marry her groom-to-be. With her 14-year-old niece, Logan, riding shotgun, she heads South on a summer road trip looking for answers about her mother.

As Olivia gets to know the town’s inhabitants, she begins to peel back the secrets of her mother’s early life—truths that force her to finally question her own future.

But when Olivia is confronted with a tragedy and finds an opportunity to right a terrible wrong, will it give her the courage to accept her mother’s past—and say yes to her own desire to start over? (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—on various U.S. military bases
• Education—Clemson University
• Currently—lives in Atlanta, Georgia


In her own words, Carolyn Dingman was a military brat, moving from base to base as a child. She used to tell lies back then, according to adults (though she still thinks of them as "stories), and now she only tells lies when she writes fiction, which…well, is the stuff of lies (at least on the surface).

Dingman graduated from Clemson University where she studied architecture. On receiving her degree, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she spent 14 years in the field. She quit when her first daughter was born.

After a second child, and while the girls were still little, Dingman started an online blog—a daily discipline she claims was instrumental in teaching her to write. After a few years, however, she was forced to quit the blog due to privacy issues—her youngest daughter, who came home from school one day and asked her mother not to write about her anymore. After signing a privacy agreement in crayon, Carolyn she turned to fiction.

Dingman still lives in Atlanta with her husband and two girls. (Adapted from the author's website and Imaginary Reads.)

Book Reviews
Though the book gets off to a slow start, Dingman's love of architecture, dry wit, and storytelling shines through as the novel progresses. She will be an author to watch as her writing matures. —Jane Blue, Prince William Cty. Lib. Syst., VA
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. The book begins with Olivia’s impulsive announcement about her trip to Georgia to find out more about her mother. It is a spontaneous decision meant as a small and insignificant trip, but this seemingly small choice ends up changing the course of her life. Have you ever made an insignificant choice that ended up shifting the path of your life? What happened?

2. One major theme of the book is the challenges of understanding one’s parents. Olivia is trying to discover who her mother was in her previous life. Can we ever really know who our parents were as children or young adults, or are we only ever able to see them through the very defining lens of being our parent?

3. Olivia’s emotional turmoil manifests itself physically in many ways. She is drinking more than her sister, Georgia, is comfortable with, and develops a klutziness that causes her to constantly injure herself. Has a trauma you’ve experienced manifested itself in similar ways? How do you find yourself acting when you’re under emotional stress?

4. Who is Olivia ultimately learning about on this journey? Do you think finding out more about her mother’s past was a positive thing for Olivia? How you think it affected the way Olivia decided to handle her own future?

5. Leo is intentionally unavailable to Olivia throughout the novel. Do you believe he is unaware of how tenuous their relationship is? Why might Leo be reluctant to acknowledge what’s happened to them as a couple?

6. Olivia convinces herself that compartmentalizing her growing feelings for Elliott and her failing relationship with Leo is defensible because it will cause the least amount of harm for the moment. Why do you, or do you not, empathize with her? How did you feel when Elliott and Leo came face to face?

7. The story of Janie and George unfolds slowly through the book. Many of the significant discoveries come from the stories that Florence shares and the photographs that Buddy shares. Why do you think Florence and Buddy might want to keep Janie and George’s life together private, even after their deaths? How did you feel when they began to reveal things?

8. Logan is an interesting travelling companion for Olivia because she is neither a child nor an adult. She has a childlike honesty, especially with Olivia, but she also possesses the keen insight of a much more mature person. Logan acts as Olivia’s companion, a touchstone, and as Olivia’s conscious in the story. How do you think Logan’s presence contributed to Olivia’s decision to stay so long in Tillman without Logan?

9. Emory takes an interest in Olivia from the moment he meets her. He is curious about Olivia because she is Janie’s child, but he is also wary of what it could mean for him personally to dredge up the past. Why do you think Emory feels he has something to hide?

10. When we first meet Buddy in the woods we see him through Olivia’s perception of him. Her understanding of him is very limited and prejudiced. As Buddy slowly reveals more of himself we begin to understand him more and view him with more depth. It is not Buddy that changes, but Olivia’s perception of Buddy that evolves. Have you ever made a snap judgment about a person that turned out to be shallow or wrong? What occurred to change your mind?

11. Olivia feels that it is necessary at the end of her “fact-finding mission” that they move the body of Oliver themselves to reunite the small family. Why do you think she wanted to do this?

12. Do you believe that Olivia was afraid of marriage or simply afraid of the idea of marrying Leo? At the end of the story Olivia and Elliott literally say, “I do,” to each other by the lake, in essence making the same promise that one makes in a marriage ceremony. Why could Elliott be the right person for Olivia?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Cane River 
Lalita Tademy, 2001
Grand Central Publishing
584 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446615884


Summary
Mingling historical fact with fiction, Lalita Tademy's epic novel is based on the lives of four generations of African American women and is the result of years of exhaustive research and an obsessive odyssey to uncover her family's past. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Her own words:
Writing fiction is a deeply personal undertaking—creating complex characters, getting them in and out of fixes, spinning tales inevitably based on one's own interpretations of life. In order to create a compelling story the writer must transport him- or herself into the work. But writing about family members, even when most of them have been dead and buried for nearly a century, as I did in my first novel, Cane River, a fictionalized saga about four generations of colored Creole slave women, carried additional challenges.

All writers face the risk of revealing more about themselves and their worldviews than they might intend. In cases like my own they must also worry about disclosing more than their family might be comfortable with and interpreting this personal history differently from other relatives. The writer might be accused of employing a thinly disguised description of one or all family members, and they may not be happy about it. It makes for interesting family gatherings.

I came to fiction writing late, after a long corporate management career. Cane River was the first word-related project I had undertaken in years that didn't have a business plan attached. (To be fair, in retrospect, some of those business plans did have fictional elements associated with them.) I had to adjust quickly to the harsh reality that if a writer doesn't do it (whatever it is), it doesn't get done. There are no backup teams ready in the wings, no motivational speeches to deliver, no need for "all-hands" meetings where you gather everyone who works for you to outline expectations. All I really needed was a spiral notebook (narrow ruled), a plentiful supply of pens (Uniball blue ink, Sanford fine point), and a minimum of three dedicated hours a day. Every day.

On the one hand, as a first-time novelist it was helpful to tell a story shaped by real places, real people, and real events. On the other, trying to recount the circumstances surrounding a fiery 1907 newspaper editorial about my ancestors, entitled "The Sin of Miscegenation," left me so emotionally spent that for weeks I was afraid I wouldn't be able to communicate anything at all.

I wrote the entire manuscript for Cane River in longhand first. I found it impossible to tackle the virgin page on a computer, as if my brain couldn't override the numbing power of that blinking cursor without handwritten crib notes. I had to spend extra hours in the afternoon or evening after the day's creative purge typing work into the desktop for subsequent editing. The old, efficient me (corporate) was appalled by the wasted time and effort, but the newly emerging right-brained me (writer) reluctantly accepted the limitations and went with the flow.

I will admit to having been surprised by the things that I found the craft of writing was not. It wasn't channeling, divine inspiration, predictable, or fun. It was wonderfully exciting when a character took the narrative in directions I hadn't anticipated, but that character always refused to hand me the descriptive words I secretly hoped for.

When I finished writing Cane River, I was enormously satisfied that it captured the story of four such remarkable women from my past. Writing is personal, sometimes wrenching, often drudgery, but I have to admit, when I held the first finished copy of the book in my hand, the agony vanished, replaced by an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction. (Courtesy of Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
A long-overdue response to Alex Haley's Roots...it is about the way the past haunts the emotions and politics of the everyday and about the quiet unmapped stories that make up history.
San Francisco Chronicle


Will haunt you long after you've shared their stories if suffering, abuse, joy...rich with fascinating detail...powerful in its story-telling...a journey well worth taking.
San Jose Mercury


(Audio version.) Like the river of its title, Tademy's saga of strong-willed black women flows from one generation to the next, from slavery to freedom. Elisabeth is a slave on a Creole plantation, as is her daughter, Suzette. The family, based on Tademy's own ancestors, wins freedom after the Civil War, but Suzette's daughter, Philomene, must struggle to keep her family together and to achieve financial independence. The melodious, expressive voices of narrators Belafonte and Payton are a pleasure to listen to, while Moore's tougher, grittier tone conveys the hardships faced by the family. However, Belafonte and Payton sometimes ignore vocal directions provided by the novel. For example, Payton reads one passage in a whisper even though the text says "in her excitement, Philomene's voice rose... louder and louder." The complex, multigenerational tale suffers somewhat in abridgment: at times the narrative too abruptly jumps ahead by decades and some emotional situations are given short shrift, as when Philomene discovers that her daughter Bette, whom she was told died as a baby nearly 20 years earlier, is actually alive and living nearby. Still, the audio succeeds in evoking the struggles of black women to provide better lives for their children despite all odds.
Publishers Weekly


Tademy halted a career as a high-powered technology executive to research her family's history. Her findings--four generations of strong-willed black women who survived slavery and racial injustices, maintained strong family ties, and left a legacy of faith and accomplishment—are transformed here into a powerful historical novel.... [A] fascinating account of American slavery and race-mixing should enthrall readers who love historical fiction. Vanessa Bush
Booklist


A selection of Oprah's Book Club, this fictionalized family history, telling of four generations of slave women living on Cane River in Louisiana from 1834 until the early 20th century, tells a larger story of how the lives of white people and black people were enmeshed during those times. The author created this novel after immersing herself in her own family's history. She includes actual photographs of her family members who became characters in the novel, pictures of documents, gravestones, and news articles—every scrap of which adds enormously to the power of this work. Tademy sticks closely to actual facts but because she creates dialogue and has to flesh out the characters, she is careful to call the work fiction. White and black people lived together, worked together, had children together —but not as equals. The slaves had little choice. In this family, Elizabeth had come to Louisiana, sold from a plantation in Virginia, where she had two babies as a result of her white master's sexual advances. She had no choice, of course, but to leave those babies behind in Virginia. Her grief and that experience are repeated again and again as she helps her daughters and granddaughters face their own life circumstances. Her daughter Suzette barely reaches puberty when she is impregnated by a visiting Frenchman. Suzette's daughter Philomene (half white) has a fulfilling "marriage" with another slave, but he is sold away so that Philomene can become the mistress of the owner. Philomene's daughter Emily (white except for one black grandmother) is pampered by her white father. After the Civil War, she is educated, and once grown, has what essentially is a long marriage to a white Frenchlandowner. The marriage isn't legal, because miscegenation is a crime, but a home and many children are part of Emily's experience. Oddly enough, those relationships that were taken as a matter of course during slavery, in the Jim Crow South became a moral outrage to the white citizens. Eventually Emily's happiness is destroyed because of this threat—literally, her children and home are endangered if she continues to live openly with a white man. This novel will interest all those who enjoy family histories. The women are tough and loving—they face impossible situations with courage and intelligence. Their priorities are to keep their families as intact as possible, and to manipulate white people as much as they can for this purpose. The very fact that the author is part of this long history adds to its great appeal. And the actual family photographs and documented history add a great deal to the narrative. Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults.
KLIATT

Discussion Questions
1. Philomene says that to be a slave was "to have nothing but still have something left to lose." Discuss the profound, but different, losses suffered by each generation of women.

2. The relationships between Suzette, Philomene and Emily and the white fathers of their children range from flat-out rape, to calculated financial arrangements cemented by childbearing, to real, if forbidden and dangerous love. What did you find most surprising about these often complex relationships?

3. Do you think Doralise was in a position to help Suzette and Philomene more than she did?

4. Cane River dramatizes the roots of turmoil within America's black community on issues of skin color. Emily, for example, is described by the author as being "color-struck." In what ways does color-consciousness continue to afflict black and mixed-race societies today? How, in Cane River, was the color-struck attitude a help or hindrance in successive generations' rising fortunes?

5. During the course of researching Cane River, as she kept unearthing tender relationships in unexpected situations, Tademy found herself frequently being forced to rethink some long-held beliefs about slavery. What, if anything, surprised you most about the relationships described in the book? In which ways did you find Tademy's depictions believable? Upsetting? Eye-opening?

6. Cane River was a community made up of French planters, slaves and gens de couleur libre, or free people of color who "had accumulated a great deal of land and wealth and were just as likely to be slave owners as their white neighbors." How do you think the free people of color justified playing a willful role in their kinsmen's oppression?

7. The free people of color considered themselves neither black nor white. Can you think of any parallels in today's society?

8. Each of the four women in the book approached life differently and handled the relationships to the men and children in their lives very differently. Discuss the differences.

9. Do you think that each of the women was a good mother? Was there more that any one of them could have done for their children than they did?

10. How-or did-each of the women fight against the oppression of their lives? Do you think there was more that Elisabeth or Suzette in particular could have done?

11. Philomene seems to be the strongest of the women. If you agree with this statement, what do you think accounts for her unusual strength? If you disagree, why-and who do you think was actually the strongest? The weakest?

12. Philomene coldly made a choice to stay with Narcisse Fredieu after he returned to Cane River following the Civil War. At this point, she was now free. Why, then, would she make this decision?

13. Suzette changed her last name three times. Why was this so significant to her?

14. Did Joseph Billes do everything he could to protect Emily and their children? Did Emily do everything possible to protect her children?

15. Elisabeth called all of her descendants to her bedside when she knew she was dying? What were the long-term repercussions of this act for her family?

16. Sunday dinners were a major event in Cane River. What made them so important? Family dinners, in which generations come together on a regular basis, seem to be a dying tradition in this country. What effect do you think this has on families today?

17. Cane River was a community with both rigid hierarchies and notable exceptions to these hierarchies. Do you think that Cane River's historical divisions of class, race and gender have contemporary parallels?

18. What are the similarities and differences between Cane River of the l800s and the United States today?

19. In many ways, Cane River, a rural farming community established by French Catholics, was unlike other southern communities of the time. What did you find most surprising about the community and its leading citizens?

20. Each of the four major women characters in Cane River was born a slave, but even so, each made distinct choices regarding how she was going to live her life. What were their choices? What were the other options they might have chosen?

21. When Madame slaps Suzette in the cookhouse, Elisabeth doesn't interfere, nor does she have a heart-to-heart conversation afterward with her daughter about what happened? Why not? Was this realistic?

22. What do you think would have happened to each of the main characters if they has not been so deeply rooted in family?

23. Which living situation do you think was easier: big house or quarter?

24. Emily, in the very last scene in the book, takes a seat in the front row of the bus to return home from her trip to town. Is this something you believe she would do? Why or why not?

25. Elisabeth, Suzette and Philomene don't talk about slavery with Emily, who was too young to remember slave life. In fact, they don't talk much about those times with one another. How does this avoidance shape them and affect the younger generation?

26. When Joseph moves Emily out of the house where they raised their children in order to marry a white woman, Emily asks to take only those things she considers to be her possessions. Was this foolish pride that possibly deprived her children of a larger inheritance?

27. Joseph stays close to Emily in his later years. Why do you think Emily continued to allow Joseph into her life after he kicked her out of their home and married another woman?

28. Emily's daughters Mary and Josephine never marry, and her son T.O. married a woman radically different than his mother. What do you think this says about the long-reaching effects of Emily's choices and behavior as a mother?

29. Elisabeth says that everyone along Cane River was 'waiting for the spider to come home." What did she mean?

30. The author of Cane River made the decision to turn her family's story into a work of fiction rather than nonfiction? What do you think motivated her to do so, and do you think it was the right decision?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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A Canticle for Leibowitz 
Walter M. Miller, Jr. 1959
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553273816


Summary
In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine of the Fallout Shelter.

In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for humanity's rebirth from the ashes. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 23, 1923
• Where—Smyma Beach, Florida, USA
• Death—January, 1996
• Education—University of Tennessee; University of Texas
• Awards—Hugo Award, 1959 (short story) and 1961 (for 
  Canticle)


Walter M. Miller, Jr. grew up in the American South and enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor. He spent most of World War II as a radio operator and tail gunner, participating in more than fifty-five combat sorties, among them the controversial destruction of the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western world. Fifteen years later he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz. The sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, followed after nearly forty years. (From the publisher.)

More
Walter Michael Miller, Jr. was an American science fiction author. Today he is primarily known for A Canticle for Leibowitz, the only novel he published in his lifetime. Prior to its publication he was a prolific writer of short stories.

Miller was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Educated at the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas, he worked as an engineer. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps as a radioman and tail gunner, flying 53 bombing missions over Italy. He took part in the bombing of the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, which proved a traumatic experience for him.

After the war, Miller converted to Catholicism, but did not practice the religion consistently. Miller married Anna Louise Becker in 1945, and they had four children. He lived with science-fiction writer Judith Merril in 1953, and her Jewish cultural heritage informed A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Between 1951 and 1957, Miller published over three dozen science fiction short stories, winning a Hugo Award in 1955 for the story "The Darfsteller." Late in the 1950s, Miller assembled a novel from three closely related novellas he had published in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1955, 1956 and 1957. His novel, entitled A Canticle for Leibowitz, was published in 1959.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic (post-holocaust) novel revolving around the canonisation of Saint Leibowitz and is considered a masterpiece of the genre. It won the 1961 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The novel is also a powerful meditation on the cycles of world history and Roman Catholicism as a force of stability during history's dark times.

After the success of A Canticle For Leibowitz, Miller never published another new novel or story in his lifetime, although several compilations of Miller's earlier stories were issued in the 1960s and 70s. As well, a radio adaptation of A Canticle for Leibowitz was produced by WHA Radio and NPR in 1981 and is available on CD.

In Miller's later years, he became a recluse, avoiding contact with nearly everyone, including family members. According to science fiction writer Terry Bisson, Miller struggled with depression during his later years, but had managed to write a 600-page manuscript for the sequel to Canticle before taking his own life with a gun in January 1996.[1] The sequel, titled Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, was completed by Bisson and published in 1997. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
This is an eloquent, an angry and a sad book...But Mr. Miller is so capable a novelist that he has never allowed his message to overwhelm the terrific story he has to tell. For imaginative power, for savage irony, for originality of conception, A Canticle for Leibowitz is altogether exceptional.
Orville Prescott - New York Times (2/22/1960)


In this ingenious fantasy, Walter M. Miller Jr. diagrams mankind's future in terms of its past.... Mr. Miller is a fine story teller at his best—which is in the opening section of the novel, depicting the medieval reprise. But when his machine shifts gears in neo-Renaissance, it stalls.... A graver misemeanor is the author's heavy-handed approach to allegory: this far too explicit moralizing dulls the luster of his imaginative format.
Martin Levin - New York Times (3/27/1960)


An extraordinary novel.... Prodigiously imaginative, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all ... simply such a memorable story as to stay with the reader for years.
Chicago Tribune


Extraordinary.... Chillingly effective.
Time


Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done) —Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized. —Paul Hughes
Amazon

An exciting and imaginative story.... Unconditionally recommended.
Library Journal

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 conversation started for A Canticle for Leibowitz:

1. Who was Leibowitz and why was he made a saint?

2. Who is the mysterious old man who appears in all three sections of Canticle? In what way does his story mirror the legend of the Wandering Jew? Why is he chosen to reappear; in other words, what is the old man's role in this novel?

3. In what ways does this book parallel the real history of the "dark ages," the Renaissance era, and the development of modern technology? How closely do Miller's fiction and real history track? Do you need knowledge of history to appreciate his book?

4. Spend some time discussing one of the central themes in Canticle—the clash between religious faith and scientific rationalism? How does that conflict play out in this work? What is Miller's stance on the issue? In what way is that theme still alive today?

5. What does the phrase "Lucifer is fallen" signifiy in this novel?

6. Discuss this passage: "The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it and with themselves as well." Is that observation true in real life?

7. Philosopher George Santayana wrote in 1905, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Miller probes that issue in Canticle. What conclusion does he reach? Is it inevitable that we will repeat our mistakes, or can we learn from the past? What are your views?

8. As a pilot during World War II, Miller bombed the Benedictine Monastery at Monte Cassino. How might that fact color both his writing of this work...and your reading of it?

9. In the final section of the book, Miller examines the role of faith in the face of suffering and destruction. He wrestles specifically with euthanasia and suicide. What are the opposing views that emerge from this discussion?

10. Given the fact that Miller himself committed suicide years later, how does this affect your reading?

11. Did you enjoy the religious and philosophical musings of Canticle...or did you find them distracting?

12. This book is 40+ years old. What relevance does it hold for today? How did you come away from this book—feeling hopeless...or hopeful?

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

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Cape May:  A Novel
Chip Cheek, 2019
Celadon Books
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250297150


Summary
A mesmerizing debut novel by Chip Cheek, Cape May explores the social and sexual mores of 1950s America through the eyes of a newly married couple from the genteel south corrupted by sophisticated New England urbanites.

Late September 1957.

Henry and Effie, very young newlyweds from Georgia, arrive in Cape May, New Jersey, for their honeymoon only to find the town is deserted. Feeling shy of each other and isolated, they decide to cut the trip short.

But before they leave, they meet a glamorous set of people who sweep them up into their drama. Clara, a beautiful socialite who feels her youth slipping away; Max, a wealthy playboy and Clara’s lover; and Alma, Max’s aloof and mysterious half-sister, to whom Henry is irresistibly drawn.

The empty beach town becomes their playground, and as they sneak into abandoned summer homes, go sailing, walk naked under the stars, make love, and drink a great deal of gin, Henry and Effie slip from innocence into betrayal, with irrevocable consequences.

Erotic and moving, this is a novel about marriage, love and sexuality, and the lifelong repercussions that meeting a group of debauched cosmopolitans has on a new marriage. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Chip Cheek is an American author whose debut novel, Cape May, was published in 2019. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Washington Square, and other journals and anthologies.

He has been awarded scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Summer Writers’ Workshop, and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as an Emerging Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation.

He lives in El Segundo, California, with his wife and baby daughter (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
If you can’t get enough of women’s fiction novels with a twist, Cape May will be your perfect book club read.
Parade


Cheek’s glamorous and nostalgic first novel is an atmospheric tale of sexual longing and loss in 1950s America that nods to classics like The Great Gatsby and Revolutionary Road.
Independent (UK)


Cheek’s smoldering debut novel focuses on naïve newlyweds from rural Georgia on their honeymoon in the chilly off-season of historic Cape May, New Jersey, in the 1950s, at a moment of fading postwar innocence. When a trio of hedonistic socialites appear on the scene, the gin-infused dynamic of this ensemble drama subverts the couple’s romance and fidelity. In propulsive prose, Cheek provides an eerie, suspenseful thrill, and the callow narrator reflects the world on the brink of change.
The National Book Review


Cheek’s strong debut is a psychodrama that shows just how easily people can be manipulated.… Cheek does a good job with his cast…. The novel’s ending is particularly startling—a memorable final note in this cogent examination of marital infidelity and betrayal.
Publishers Weekly


This erotic debut novel will draw in readers and stay with them. The author’s perceptive exploration of innocence and experience, corruption and betrayal, makes for compelling reading.
Library Journal


(Starred review) This remarkable debut novel offers a sobering reminder of how the possibilities of life, when first encountered, often carry their own riptide.
Booklist


(Starred review) Deceptively relaxed and simple at first…. It soon reveals itself as a swirling vortex of psychological suspense…. The 1950s setting, the pellucid prose, and the propulsive plot make this very steamy debut novel about morality and desire feel like a classic.
Kirkus Reviews


In Cape May, Cheek shows that every couple encounters such a moment of their own—whether physical, emotional or some combination of both—and it holds the power to change a relationship forever.
Shelf Awareness

Discussion Questions
1. How does the anonymity provided by a mostly-empty seaside town contribute to the story?

2. How does the time period inform the characters’ interactions and decisions throughout the book?

3. Henry is only 20 years old, and Effie just 18. Do their ages change how you feel about them? Why or why not?

4. What role do wealth and status play in the characters’ perspectives on life and on each other?

5. Discuss how you feel about Alma.

6. Marriage involves both give and take. What does Henry give? Take? How about Effie? What can this tell us about their relationship from beginning to end?

7. Is it possible to define a “breaking point” for a marriage? What factors have to be considered? Do you think it is possible to truly forgive?

8. Would Henry and Effie’s marriage have been different if they hadn’t gone to Cape May for their honeymoon?

9. Discuss how you feel about the epilogue.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Captain's Daughter 
Meg Mitchell Moore, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385541251


Summary
An emotionally gripping novel about a woman who returns to her hometown in coastal Maine and finds herself pondering the age-old question of what could have been

Growing up in Little Harbor, Maine, the daughter of a widowed lobsterman, Eliza Barnes could haul a trap and row a skiff with the best of them. But she always knew she'd leave that life behind.

Now that she's married, with two kids and a cushy front-row seat to suburban country club gossip in an affluent Massachusetts town, she feels adrift.

When her father injures himself in a boating accident, Eliza pushes the pause button on her own life to come to his aid. But when she arrives in Maine, she discovers her father's situation is more dire than he let on. Eliza's homecoming is further complicated by the reemergence of her first love—and memories of their shared secret.

Then Eliza meets Mary Brown, a seventeen-year-old local who is at her own crossroad, and Eliza can't help but wonder what her life would have been like if she'd stayed.

Filled with humor, insight, summer cocktails, and gorgeous sunsets, The Captain's Daughter is a compassionate novel about the life-changing choices we make and the consequences we face in their aftermath. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Raised—on military bases around the US
• Education—B.A., Providence College; M.A., New York University
• Currently—Newburyport, Massachusetts


Meg Mitchell Moore is an American author of several novels, including her most widely known, Admissions (2015). With a father in the U.S. Navy, she grew up on military bases around the country, eventually spending her senior year in Winter Harbor, Maine, where she graduated from high school.

From there Mitchell went to Providence College to earn her B.A. and spend a junior year abroad at Oxford University. Then it was on to New York University for her M.A. in English literature.

Following her school years, Mitchell moved to Boston, becoming a writer for technology magazines and, later, for a number of business and consumer magazines.

When her husband took a new job, the family—with an infant daughter and another on the way—moved to Vermont. It was a turning point for Mitchell, who eventually applied and was accepted into the storied Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College.
 
As Mitchell says on her website, she took up writing at a very young age: the moment she "figured out how the cursive T and F were different. So while she always wanted to write, Bread Loaf convinced her that she needed to.

Mitchell's debut The Arrivals came out in 2011, followed the next year by So Far Away. Her third book, Admissions, was published in 2015. Regarding the length parents will go to get their children into top colleges, the novel was inspired by living in California for a single year. There Mitchell witnessed parents who would do what it took, no matter the toll on the family, to ensure their children got the best (and most expensive) shot in life. Admissions was well received: Publishers Weekly called it "a page turner as well as an insightful character study."

A fourth novel, The Captain's Daughter (2017), takes place in Maine, a setting loosely based on Winter Harbor where Mitchell spent her last year in high school. (Adapted from various online sources and the author's webpage.)

Book Reviews
Eliza and Rob face romantic temptation during their time apart, which is the least interesting part of a story that otherwise deftly mines issues of loyalty, class, and what it means to be a parent.… [A] moving novel.
Publishers Weekly


Moore focuses on relationships, loss, and change though the eyes of warm and likable everywoman Eliza. Verdict: A summer read with boats, the ocean, and sunscreen but focused on the life-changing events and the power of love and family to deal with life's problems. —Jan Marry, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA
Library Journal


[A] mildly thoughtful, mainly comforting slice of domestic pie.… Moore raises some interesting issues about class and the importance of money to happiness, but by solving her characters' problems too neatly and painlessly she undercuts the novel's seriousness.
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)

(We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available.)

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Captains and the Kings 
Taylor Caldwell, 1973
Random House
816 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449205624


Summary
Captains and the Kings is the saga of young Joseph Armagh, recently of Ireland, who promised his dying mother to care for his younger siblings. Landing in Boston, Joseph's determination carries him through years shady-deal making and his gradual accumulation of wealth and power.

In this work, Caldwell takes on the global power brokers. Running through the story line is a description of the way the international financiers and industrialists (all private consortiums owned by an elite of the world's richest families and persons) hijack governments around the globe; instigating wars and gaining control over the warring countries through manipulation of the enormous debts incurred during a war.

While a disclaimer states that all persons portrayed in the book are fictional, many see the story as loosely based on the life of Joseph Kennedy, scion of President John F. Kennedy, Robert, Senators Robert F. and Teddy Kennedy. (From Wikipedia.)

Captains and the Kings was made into a 1976 TV mini-series.

Author Bio
• Birth—September 7, 1900
• Where—Manchester, England, UK
• Raised—in the US
• Death—August 30, 1985
• Where—Greenwich, Connecticut
• Education—University of Buffalo (New York)
• Awards—1948, National League of American Pen Women
   Gold Medal; 1950, Grand Prix Chatvain


Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell was an Anglo-American novelist and prolific author of popular fiction, also known by the pen names Marcus Holland and Max Reiner, and by her married name of J. Miriam Reback.

In her fiction, she often used real historical events or persons. Taylor Caldwell's best-known works include Dynasty of Death (1938), an epic story about intrigues and alliances of two Western Pennsylvania families involved in the manufacture of armaments, Dear and Glorious Physician (about St.Luke), and Captains and the Kings. Her last major novel, Answer as a Man, appeared in 1980.

Taylor Caldwell was born in Manchester, England, into a family of Scottish background. Her family descended from the Scottish clan of MacGregor of which the Taylors are a subsidiary clan. In 1907 she emigrated to the United States with her parents and younger brother. Her father died shortly after the move, and the family struggled. At the age of eight she started to write stories, and in fact wrote her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, at the age of twelve (although it was to remain unpublished until 1975). In 1919 she married William F. Combs, had Peggy and divorced in 1931. Between the years 1918 and 1919 she served in the United States Navy Reserve. From 1923 to 1924 she was a court reporter in New York State Department of Labor in Buffalo, New York and from 1924 to 1931 a member of the Board of Special Inquiry at the Department of Justice in Buffalo.

In 1931 she graduated from the University at Buffalo, and in 1934 began a collaboration with her second husband, Marcus Reback, to write several bestsellers, the first of which was Dynasty of Death. During her career as a writer Caldwell's books sold over 30 million copies. She received several awards, among them the National League of American Pen Women Gold Medal (1948), Buffalo Evening News Award (1949), and Grand Prix Chatvain (1950).

Caldwell was married four times altogether—the third time to William Everett Stancell, and the fourth time to William Robert Prestie (who died in 2002). She had two daughters, Judith and Mary (Judith died in 1979).

Caldwell was an outspoken conservative and for a time wrote for the John Birch Society's monthly journal American Opinion and even associated with the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. Her memoir, On Growing Up Tough, appeared in 1971, consisting of many edited-down articles from American Opinion. Caldwell continued writing until 1980, when a stroke left her deaf and unable to speak. She died of pulmonary failure in Greenwich, Connecticut on September 2, 1985. (From Wikipedia.)

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

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get your discussion started for Captains and the Kings:

1. What drives Joseph Armagh—his promise to care for his siblings, his bitter experiences as an Irish immigrant, his own personal ambitions—or all three? Do you see him as an admirable character...or not?

2. Talk about life at the orphanage and how it affects Sean and Mary Regina.

3. What were the hardships faced by the newly arrived immigrants in America? How did their experiences mirror those of other newly arrived immigrants, perhaps your own ancestors?

4. Discuss the roles that the titans of industry play in this work. Do you feel Caldwell's writing is biased or objective? Are or were political systems dominated by major corporations; in other words, have governments, even democracies, had a history of doing the bidding of private consortiums, made up of powerful financiers and industrialists?

5. Can you see the historical parallels in this work to Joseph Kennedy and his sons, Jack, Bobby, and Teddy?

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

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The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls 
Anissa Gray, 2019
Penguin Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984802439 


Summary
The Butler family has had their share of trials—as sisters Althea, Viola, and Lillian can attest—but nothing prepared them for the literal trial that will upend their lives.
 
Althea, the eldest sister and substitute matriarch, is a force to be reckoned with and her younger sisters have alternately appreciated and chafed at her strong will.

They are as stunned as the rest of the small community when she and her husband, Proctor, are arrested, and in a heartbeat the family goes from one of the most respected in town to utter disgrace.

The worst part is, not even her sisters are sure exactly what happened.
 
As Althea awaits her fate, Lillian and Viola must come together in the house they grew up in to care for their sister’s teenage daughters. What unfolds is a stunning portrait of the heart and core of an American family in a story that is as page-turning as it is important. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—St. Joseph, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., Western Michigan University; M.A., New York University
• Currently—Atlanta, Georgia


Anissa Gray is a journalist of some 20 years, as well as a novelist. Born in St. Joseph, Michigan, she received her B.A. from Western Michigan University and went on to earn an M.A. in English and American literature from New York University.

Following her graduate work, Gray remained in New York, taking a job as a print reporter for Reuters, for whom she covered business news and international finance. Then she headed for Atlanta to work in broadcast journalism for CNN. She has served as a writer, producer and editor, eventually becoming Senior Editor at CNN Worldwide. Gray has been a contributor to award winning stories that have won both an Emmy and a DuPont-Columbia Award.

The Care and Feeing of Ravenously Hungry Girls, Gray's debut novel, was published in 2019. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her wife. (Adapted from the publisher and the author's website.)

Book Reviews
If you enjoyed An American Marriage, read The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls… an absorbing commentary on love, family and forgiveness.
Washington Post


The inequities of the justice system, the fortitude of women of color, and the bittersweet struggle to connect are rendered ravishly in this bighearted novel.
Oprah Magazine


[An] intimate family saga sure to appeal to fans of Tayari Jones and Celeste Ng.
Entertainment Weekly


As in Tayari Jones’s best-selling An American Marriage, Gray uses imprisonment as the backdrop for a disarmingly compelling story that skirts easy answers and sentimentality. Conversational in tone and difficult in subject, Care and Feeding tells not just an American story but several important ones.
Vogue
 

Gray’s absorbing novel is about family and the things we hunger for.
Real Simple


[A] moving debut.… Gray uses alternate chapters narrated by the three sisters to fill in details of their upbringing… and their current struggles.… [R]eaders will be deeply affected by this story of a family wrestling to support itself.
Publishers Weekly


Sisters…are knot-tight, with eldest Althea the de facto matriarch of a family seen as top of the heap in their town. So when Althea and husband Proctor are arrested for mysterious reasons… townsfolk turn their heads in disgust.
Library Journal


Gray’s engrossing and moving debut novel considers secrets and lies and their effect on the families of three sisters.
Booklist


Gray manages a large cast of characters with ease, sharply differentiating between the voices.… [Some] scenes… tend to drag… [with] more pressing family dramas at hand. A deep dive into the shifting alliances and betrayals among siblings.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Early in the novel, Althea says, "I used to think I was like a river. A mighty force of nature." What does she mean by this, and how does her view of herself change by the end of the novel?

2. Why do you think Baby Viola is Althea’s favored child? How does this affect Baby Vi, and what does it mean for Kim, who is so at odds with her mother?

3. Even in death, the presence of the Butler parents can be felt throughout the story. How do parental relationships affect each of the sisters and Joe?

4. How do you think Baby Vi and Kim will be affected by the long-term incarceration of their parents?

5. The relationships between Althea, Viola, Lillian, and Joe range from being warm to being incredibly fraught. How do the siblings understand or misunderstand one another in crucial ways?

6. Discuss Althea’s relationship with her mother and the significance of the Bible Althea later sends to Lillian.

7. The sisters all undergo transformations over the course of the novel. Discuss the critical changes each sister experiences and what led up to those moments.

8. When Lillian, who has been the caregiver for her nieces, urges Viola to take the girls, Viola is resistant. Compare the ways in which the sisters view and approach their family commitments and how that changes over time.

9. While family relationships are at the heart of the novel, friendships are crucially important as well. Which friendship pairings—Lillian and Nai Nai; Viola and David; Althea and Mercedes—were most resonant?

10. Late in the novel, Viola says, "I’m thinking of how limits become limber. Pliable, when pressed with the thing in you that cries out, endlessly, More, please." Discuss how this applies to each of the characters and the title of the book.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Career of Evil  (Cormoran Strike Series, 3)
Robert Galbraith / J.K. Rowling, 2018
Little, Brown and Company
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316349895


Summary
The third in the highly acclaimed series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott.

When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman's severed leg.

Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible—and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality.

With the police focusing on one of the suspects, Strike and Robin delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Robert Galbraith
• Birth—July 31, 1965
• Where—Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England, UK
• Education—Exeter University
• Awards—3 Nestle Smarties Awards; British Book Award- Children's Book of the Year; British Book Awards- Author of the Year; British Book Awards- Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives in Perthshire, Scotland and London, England.


Joanne "Jo" Rowling, better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling, as well as the mystery writer Robert Galbraith, is a British author known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived while on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films.

Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2010, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be $1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom.

She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children's High Level Group.

Early years
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (nee Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce. (The school's headmaster has been suggested as the inspiration for Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore).

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called "Rabbit." He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." When she was a young teenager, her great aunt gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department. Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."

Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that same year, Rowling’s mother died, after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, a death that heavily affected her writing: she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born in 1993 in Portugal. The couple separated in November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.

After Jessica's birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on state welfare support.

She wrote in many cafes, especially Nicolson's Cafe, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. As she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafes was not because her flat had no heat, but because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, her editor Barry Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.

In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot....I've had some of my blackest moments with this book..... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.

A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."

The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July, 2007, (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."

Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.

The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.

Life after Harry Potter
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When first listed as a billionaire by Forbes in 2004, Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain. In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London, (on a street with 24-hour security).

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her Aberfeldy home. Their son was born in 2003 and a daughter in 2005.

In the UK, Rowling has received honorary degrees from St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen; and in the US, from Harvard. She has been awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (During the Elysée Palace ceremony, she revealed that her maternal French grandfather had also received the Légion d'honneur for his bravery during World War I.) According to Matt Latimer, a former White House administrator for President George W. Bush, Rowling was turned down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because administration officials believed that the Harry Potter series promoted witchcraft.

Subsequent writing
Rowling has stated that she plans to continue writing, preferably under a pseudonym. In 2012, however, under her own name, she published her first novels for adults, The Casual Vacancy. Although she "thinks it's unlikely" that she will write another Harry Potter, an "encyclopedia" of wizarding along with unpublished notes may be published sometime in the future.

Using the pen name "Robert Galbraith," Rowling published The Cuckoo's Calling in 2013. It reached the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list within weeks. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
If your taste in detective fiction runs to the minimalist, then this is not for you. If Georges Simenon is a simple, perfect kitchen stool and Agatha Christie a sensible wingbacked chair, then Robert Galbraith is a vast, overstuffed sofa, complete with dog hair and something unmentionable behind the cushions. No one could complain, though, that Galbraith doesn’t deliver value for money. Racing up and down the country, …the narrative is dizzying in its proliferation of character, location and detail, and tirelessly, relentlessly specific.… [T]he narrative regularly seems heroically daft, but the whole is delivered with such sheer gusto—and, crucially, such a confident hold on a deliriously clever plot—that most sensible readers will simply cave in and enjoy it.
Christobel Kent - Guardian (UK)


Strike and Robin are just as magnetic as ever …but Ms. Rowling, alas, has plopped them into a story line that feels like a halfhearted recycling of episodes from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. The result is a lurid and predictable novel—not as disappointing as Ms. Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter venture, The Casual Vacancy, but only because of Robin and Strike.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


[Rowling's] [G]ripping…. THe seamless way Rowling integrates [the] personal and professional story lines makes Career of Evil an absorbing book, pulpy, fast and satisfying.… Career of Evil feels special—a step forward for a series that has been more concerned with entertainment than complexity at times.… Rowling finds a larger theme, too—the terrible ongoingness and untidiness of life, the ways in which catching a criminal doesn't necessarily finish a crime, only a book. This fresh scope makes for the best novel she has written as Robert Galbraith. It's not Harry Potter; that universe is an irreplicable astonishment. The good news is that its creator evidently has some magic left.
Charles Finch - New York Times Book Review


[Galbraith has] invented a serial killer for the ages, one who chills us from the book's grim but riveting opening.… This perfectly paced mystery is packed with surprises, all of which play out with flawless crime-fiction logic.
Jocelyn McClurg - USA Today


Pure pleasure.… That's what makes these novels so good: They are clever, tightly plotted mysteries with all of the most pleasurable elements of the genre (good guy, bad guy, clues, twists, murder!), but with stunning emotional and moral shading.
Annalisa Quinn - NPR


Hugely entertaining.… This gifted storyteller has taken full command of the new turf.… Career of Evil succeeds powerfully on its own terms
Lloyd Sachs - Chicago Tribune


Another triumph.… Its darkness is mitigated by its sparkling protagonists.
Kim Hubbard - People

[A] captivating third novel written under [the] Galbraith pseudonym…. Maintaining a high level of suspense throughout, Rowling transforms Robin into a professional equal of Strike's and sets the stage for further complexities in their relationship.
Publishers Weekly


Rowling is, as always, an unflinching chronicler of evil…. The story has its longueurs, and if Galbraith weren't actually Rowling, an editor might have told him to trim a bit…. The book ends on a cliffhanger …and Rowling's readers will eagerly await the next installment.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our GENERIC MYSTERY QUESTIONS to start a discussion for CAREER OF EVIL … then take off on your own:

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

1. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
2. Are they plausible or implausible?
3. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

1. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
2. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
3. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
4. Perhaps it's too predictable.
5. Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

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

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Carlota's Legacy (Jewel Trilogy, 2)
Claude Brickell, 2014
Bricbooks
143 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780557123100 (Kindle)


Summary
This modern-day adventure, rooted in a rich, historical past, has young, accomplished art historian Michael Bennington approached at a New York jewelry auction by a pleasant enough couple from Belgium, nobility actually, who wish to engage him in a curious assignment. He must track down the whereabouts of a priceless diamond and ruby necklace the couple thought they owned, but after having theirs appraised, discovered it was only a cut-glass fake.

Michael accepts the assignment with a heightened passion—his specialty is 19th century jewels—and he’s off to Mexico City where the real necklace originated.  From there he traces its path to St. Petersburg, Paris, Los Angeles and New York and ends up in Brussels for a harrowing life-and-death finale. The quirky former owners of the artifact are all beyond belief but historically accurate nonetheless and their exotic and lurid pasts both astound and captivate.

Carlota’s Legacy continues the entertaining exploits of the likable Bennington character in the second installment.

This is the second installment in the Jewel Trilogy: it is preceded by The Napoleon Connection (2014) and followed The Brotherhood Wars (2014).

Author Bio
Claude Brickell is a New York-based writer of art history adventure mysteries.  His Jewel Trilogy introduces readers to young, likable and accomplished art historian Michael Bennington as he searches the world for rare and missing artifacts in three thrilling installments: The Napoleon Connection, Carlota's Legacy and The Brotherhood Wars. 

Claude's formal education was with the American University and the Sorbonne in Paris, Oxford University in England and graduate of New York University.  He is a world-traveler, a certified fine arts appraiser, a filmmaker, a former ice hockey league player and an equestrian enthusiast.  He is currently an instructor at New York University. (From the author.)

Visit the author's book website — and his art blog.
Visit Claude on Facebook.

Discussion Questions
1. What is Michael Bennington all about? What drives this artifact enthusiast to the ends of the world to discover their whereabouts?

2. How does Bennington compare with other artifact hunters such as Robert Langdon? Does his age-difference add to or hinder his success?

3. How does Bennington add up in the area of love and intimate relationships? Is he struggling or hopeless? (most discernible after reading all three installments).

4. How convincing are the author's depictions and descriptions of the various locales Bennington visits?

5. How would you define exactly the genre of The Jewel Trilogy?

6. What age range and reader group do you feel The Jewel Trilogy is best suited for?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Carnegie's Maid 
Marie Benedict, 2018
Sourcebooks
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781492646617


Summary
From the author of The Other Einstein, the mesmerizing tale of what kind of woman could have inspired an American dynasty.

Clara Kelley is not who they think she is.

She's not the experienced Irish maid who was hired to work in one of Pittsburgh's grandest households. She's a poor farmer's daughter with nowhere to go and nothing in her pockets. But the other woman with the same name has vanished, and pretending to be her just might get Clara some money to send back home.

If she can keep up the ruse, that is. Serving as a lady's maid in the household of Andrew Carnegie requires skills she doesn't have, answering to an icy mistress who rules her sons and her domain with an iron fist.

What Clara does have is a resolve as strong as the steel Pittsburgh is becoming famous for, coupled with an uncanny understanding of business, and Andrew begins to rely on her. But Clara can't let her guard down, not even when Andrew becomes something more than an employer. Revealing her past might ruin her future -- and her family's.

With captivating insight and heart, Carnegie's Maid tells the story of one brilliant woman who may have spurred Andrew Carnegie's transformation from ruthless industrialist into the world's first true philanthropist. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Marie Benedict, AKA Heather Terrell, writes both adult and young adult fiction. She is perhaps best known as Marie Benedict for her works of historical fiction: The Only Woman in the Room (2019), Carnegie's Maid (2018), and The Other Einstein (2016).

As Heather Terrell, she has written Brigid of Kildare (2010, based on the medieval life of Ireland's St. Brigid) and two suspense novels, The Map Thief (2008) and The Chrysalis (2007).

Her young adult books are also under Heather Terrell: the Books of Eva series (Relic, Boundary, and Chronicle), as well as the Fallen Angel series (Fallen Angel and Eternity).

Benedict/Terrill has been drawn to stories of strong women, especially unsung heroines, both real and fictional. A book lover from childhood, it was a gift from her aunt that sparked her imagination—Marion Zimmerman Bradley's tale about the women of the Arthurian legend, The Mists of Avalon. As she told Book Reporter:

This book opened my eyes to the hidden voices and truths lurking in history and legend—particularly the buried histories of women—and set me on an admittedly circuitous path toward a life of uncovering those unknown stories and memorializing them through fiction.

Before becoming an author Benedict/Terrill practiced law in New York City. She received her B.A. from Boston College and her J.D. from Boston University. She met her husband in 2002 while standing in the customs line after landing in Hong Kong. The two were married in 2002 and have since moved to  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where they live with their children. (Adapted from various online sources.)

Book Reviews
[An] excellent historical novel.… While there are elements of Cinderella, Benedict doesn’t let herself or her characters stray from historical realities. The true reason for Carnegie’s transformation from industrialist to builder of libraries for all remains a mystery, but Benedict’s imagination supplies a delightful possibility.
Publishers Weekly


With its well-drawn characters, good pacing, and excellent sense of time and place, this volume should charm lovers of historicals, romance, and the Civil War period. Neither saccharine nor overly dramatized, it's a very satisfying read. —Pamela O'Sullivan, Coll. at Brockport Lib., SUNY
Library Journal


[E]ngaging. The chaste romance will draw readers of inspirational fiction, while the novel is constructed to appeal to those seeking a tale with an upstairs-downstairs dynamic and all-but-invisible female characters who are either the impetus for or the actual originators of great men's great ideas.
Booklist


[I]maginative…. Benedict evokes the time period through her graceful writing style, which can seem stiff at first but soon immerses readers in "Downton Abbey"-esque drama. With meticulous historical detail, the luxury of the Carnegies' world is juxtaposed with the destitution of the poor,
Book Page

Discussion Questions
1. Carnegie’s Maid opens with Clara Kelly’s experience emigrating to America from Ireland in the 1860s. Do any aspects of Clara’s immigration surprise you, such as the ship voyage or the arrival inspection? If you were in Clara’s shoes, how would you feel going through the immigration process? Does Clara’s experience mirror that of you or someone in your own family?

2. How does Clara’s identity as an Irish Catholic immigrant affect her in America? If immigrating today, what similar or different challenges would Clara face?

3. Andrew Carnegie’s history has been described as the greatest rags to riches American story, and in some ways, Clara’s story mirrors his. Did you find her rise—though not as meteoric as Andrews’s due to gender constrictions—believable? If not, would you find it more believable if she’d been a man? If the story was set in today’s world, how would Andrew and Clara’s stories change? Would Clara still face the same challenges?

4. Compare and contrast Andrew and Clara. How are they similar? How are they different? Who do you relate to more?

5. While Clara inhabits and works in a traditional nineteenth century women’s realm, she aspires to achievements that would have been perceived as exclusively male. Discuss the spheres available to women at that time and the ways both Clara and Margaret Carnegie operated outside those spheres. Did anything about their allotted domains surprise you? What do you think about the capacity for change in the women’s realm? Do you think there is still an opportunity and need for change today?

6. The novel takes place in a unique moment in American history—just as the Civil War ends and the Gilded Age begins, showcasing a world on the cusp of tremendous change industrially, politically, economically and socially. How does this historical setting affect the characters? What role, if any, does it play in shaping their lives? Does it provide them with opportunities they would not otherwise have?

7. What is something you learned about this time period or Andrew Carnegie that fascinated you? If you could live during the Gilded Age, would you? What would your life be like?

8. Commitment and duty to her family in Ireland influence Clara tremendously. How does this sense of duty motivate her decisions and actions? How does it affect her ability to stay on the path she’s carved for herself? Is Andrew prompted by the same responsibilities, or does he have different drives? If you were in Clara’s shoes, what would drive you forward?

9. Andrew and Clara’s master and servant relationship changes during the course of the book. How does this evolution happen? What do you think it was that drew them together? Do you think their relationship could have lasted longer under different circumstances? How did you feel about the outcome of their relationship?

10. The title of the novel is subject to several interpretations. What meanings can you glean from the title, and how did your understanding of the meaning of Carnegie’s Maid change from the beginning to the end of the novel, if at all?

11. Andrew Carnegie is a well-known industrialist, who was the richest man in the world in his day and the founder of modern philanthropy. What was your understanding of him before you read this novel, and how did your understanding change, if it all? Did you know about his philanthropy and role in the formation of the modern library system? If you had the fortune of Carnegie, what cause would you devote yourself to?

12. While the world of Carnegie’s Maid is grounded in facts, Clara Kelly herself is a fictional character, although her immigrant experience and her lady’s maid role are founded upon historical research. Would the story be different for you if Clara was entirely non-fiction?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Caroline: Little House, Revisited
Sarah Miller, 2017
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062685346


Summary
In this novel authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in a dazzling work of historical fiction, a captivating story that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before — Caroline Ingalls, "Ma" in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House books.

In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls and her family leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and the warm bosom of her family, for a new life in Kansas Indian Territory.

Packing what they can carry in their wagon, Caroline, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril.

The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone, sickness tended without the aid of doctors, and babies birthed without the accustomed hands of mothers or sisters.

But Caroline’s new world is also full of tender joys. In adapting to this strange new place and transforming a rough log house built by Charles’ hands into a home, Caroline must draw on untapped wells of strength she does not know she possesses.

For more than eighty years, generations of readers have been enchanted by the adventures of the American frontier’s most famous child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the Little House books. Now, that familiar story is retold in this captivating tale of family, fidelity, hardship, love, and survival that vividly reimagines our past. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Sarah Miller began writing her first novel at 10 years old, and has spent half her life working in libraries and bookstores. She is the author of Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller, which was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and nominated for numerous state award lists. Sarah lives in Michigan with her family. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Through assured prose, Miller puts us in those conversations, showing us the fear and uncertainty behind Wilder’s implacable, unflappable "Ma," but also her strength and devotion to her husband and children.… [T]his is a stunning novel. Miller’s research is impeccable and her writing exquisite.
Historical Novels Review


Now, Miller draws [Caroline Ingalls] onto center stage, gifting readers with a beautiful portrait of a remarkable, true pioneer. This is a beautiful tribute to a mother and a family who followed their dreams and a tale that is as uplifting and real as the original Little House books.
RT Book Reviews


A stunning and sentimental novel brimming with historical detail, Caroline grants readers a chance at a new experience with an old familiar story.
Bustle


This character-driven narrative balances a submissive and dutiful wife with a passionate young woman who openly and tenderly admires her husband and relishes their lovemaking. Verdict: Not to be missed by Wilder's grown-up fans. —Wendy W. Paige, Shelby Cty. P.L. Morristown.
Library Journal


Readers who grew up cherishing the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder will find much to savor in Caroline.… Full of lyrical descriptions of the wild beauty of the Kansas countryside, Caroline is a well-researched and thoughtful look at the inner life of one of America’s most famous frontier women.
BookPage


Caroline is compellingly mindful, particularly when she studies the effects of a tightly knit family life on her daughters and of relentless, brutal work on her husband, herself, and her far-flung neighbors in Indian territory. Beguiling, pulse-pounding historical fiction.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Caroline: Little House, Revisited … then take off on your own:

1. If you have been a fan of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series, how well does Sarah Miller adhere to the basic story, especially her characterization of "Ma"?

2. Follow-up to Question 1: How would you describe Caroline? Talk about the ways in which Miller explores the emotional as well as the geographical terrain of a life lived on the edge of civilization, especially as it applies to Ma.

3. Follow-up to Question 2: What does Caroline observe about the effects of prairie life — and a tight-knit family — on her husband and daughters.

4. Does Miller's book include any surprises — new details or altered events — that are not found in Wilder's original telling? (Consider, for instance, Carrie's birth.)

5. How does this new book handle the treatment of the Osage Indians? Does Miller's treatment differ from Wilder's? In what way are Caroline's attitudes at variance with her husband's. Would you say either of their views reflect those of the era's culture?

6. Discuss the pioneer life, its hardships and perils. Talk especially about the difficulties for women and the myriad responsibilities that normally fall under their purview: tending to illness, giving birth, keeping house. How might you have fared, making your way across the frontier in a wagon or living in a rough-hewn log cabin? What inner strengths would you have had to tap into?

7. Do visit the author's webpage where she lays out all the sources she has based her novel on. Does undertanding the degree of Miller's research make a difference in how you view her novel?

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

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Carry the One
Carol Anshaw, 2012
Simon & Schuster
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451636888 


Summary
Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen’s wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidentally hits and kills a girl on a dark country road.

For the next twenty-five years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, craft their lives in response to this single tragic moment. As one character says, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.” Through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect.

As they seek redemption through addiction, social justice, and art, Anshaw’s characters reflect our deepest pain and longings, our joys, and our transcendent moments of understanding. This wise, wry, and erotically charged novel derives its power and appeal from the author’s exquisite use of language; her sympathy for her recognizable, very flawed characters; and her persuasive belief in the transforming forces of time and love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March, 1946
• Where—Grosse Pointe, Michigan, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Vermont College of  Fine Arts
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois, and Amsterdam,
   The Netherlands


Carol Anshaw is an American novelist and short story writer. Her books include Lucky in the Corner, Seven Moves, Aquamarine, and Carry the One. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories in 1994 and 1998.

Anshaw was born in Michigan and grew up with her family, which happily divided its time between Michigan, where her father was a contractor, and Ft Lauderdale, Florida. In 1968 she moved to Chicago, marrying Charles J. White III in 1969, whom she divorced in 1985.

In 1992 she acquired her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has won a National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, an NEA Grant, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, a Carl Sandburg Award and Society of Midland Authors Award.

Anshaw teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also a painter, currently working on a sequence of paintings of the novelist and poet, Vita Sackville-West.

Since 1996, Anshaw has been in a relationship with Jessie Ewing. The two divide their time between Chicago and Amsterdam. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Splendid...seductive...vivid.... In sketches, landscapes, and erotic etchings, [Anshaw] carries not just one but all her characters through a quarter century of adulthood. And she makes the task look graceful.
Entertainment Weekly


(Starred review.) The one that must be carried when the Kenney siblings add themselves up is the girl who was hit and killed when Nick and Alice were driving home, stoned and stupid, from their sister Carmen’s wedding. That’s the first chapter: the rest of the novel and the rest of their lives—sex and drugs and prison visits, family parties and divorce, raising teenagers, painting, politics, and addiction—play out with that guilt and loss forever in the background. Anshaw has a deft touch with the events of ordinary life, giving them heft and meaning without being ponderous. As the siblings’ lives skip across time, Carmen’s marriage, shadowed by the accident, falls apart; painter Alice’s career moves forward unlike her life, as she remains stuck on the same woman, her former sister-in-law; and astronomer Nick fights, with decreasing success, his craving for drugs. Funny, touching, knowing—about painting and parents from hell, about small letdowns and second marriages, the parking lots where people go to score, and most of all, about the ways siblings shape and share our lives—Anshaw (Seven Moves) makes it look effortless. Don’t be fooled: this book is a quiet, lovely, genuine accomplishment.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) In her fourth novel (after Lucky in the Corner), award-winning writer Anshaw presents memorable characters whose lives have been affected by a single tragedy, which results in heartbreak and missed second chances. Twenty years earlier, siblings Alice and Nick leave their sister Carmen's wedding at 3 a.m., stoned, tipsy, and unfamiliar with the dark country roads; Olivia, Nick's girlfriend, is driving. A few miles on, Olivia hits and kills a girl walking on the side of the road. Over the years, the accident is always in the background for all the characters. Alice, a successful artist, goes in and out of lesbian relationships and obsessively paints more than a dozen portraits of the girl who was killed. Carmen's marriage does not last, and she buries herself in worthy causes. Olivia serves a brief prison sentence and then leaves Nick because of his drug habit. Nick, now a promising astronomer, is the one who broods the most deeply over the past. Verdict: Anshaw deftly depicts family ties broken and reconnected, portraying the best and the worst of this group of eccentrics. Recommended for readers of well-crafted literary fiction. —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal


From a 1983 wedding through Election Day 2008, Anshaw (Lucky in the Corner, 2002, etc.) tracks a Chicago family unsettled by a fatal accident. [Characters] haunted by memories of the dead girl...yet Anshaw doesn't suggest the accident fundamentally changed the arcs of their lives; her understanding of human fallibility and existential contingency is too subtle for that kind of artistic determinism. Instead, she quietly follows her characters through the usual stuff of growing up and growing older: marriages, breakups, material success and spiritual uncertainty.... Sharply observed and warmly understanding—another fine piece of work from this talented author.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. At her wedding reception, Carmen, in a moment of doubt about marriage, thinks: “Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. Forward was the only available direction.” How much of life is lived on this principle—taking the step that seems to come next? How often does this turn out to be following one bad decision with another based on the first? How does this apply to the characters in this book?

2. How do Carmen, Alice, and Nick change over the course of the novel? Which of them changes the most, which the least?

3. Even before the accident, the lives of everyone involved were entwined (by marriage, sex, family, friendship). Discuss how the nature of these relationships is affected by the accident. Does the accident strengthen any bonds? Does it weaken others? How does each character’s perceptions of the others change throughout the course of the novel?

4. As the driver of the car, Olivia is the only one who serves prison time for Casey’s death, and as Nick enviously reflects, “prison was forcing her to atone.” Do you think the others try to atone in their own ways? Do you think Nick’s envy of Olivia’s punishment is justified? Do you agree that, in a way, Olivia is the one who suffers the easiest punishment, because even though prison is brutal, it’s a physical, finite sentence for what they collectively did?

5. Nick’s is the only life that eventually falls completely apart. Do you think his drug use is related to his guilt, knowing he could’ve prevented Casey’s death? Why or why not?

6. Mourning and loss are themes of the book. How do the characters grieve differently? How does this grief affect their choices? In what ways can mourning be a selfish experience? What do the characters mourn besides the loss of Casey’s life?

7. Discuss the way parenthood and parent/child relationships are portrayed in the novel. Think about Gabe and Carmen; Rob and Heather; Nick, Carmen, and Alice’s relationships with Horace and Loretta; and even Terry and Shanna Redman.

8. Romantic relationships seem to be tough for all of the characters. Alice spends her time yearning for Maude (who cannot seem to decide what she wants) and sleeping with other women to fill the void, but once they are finally together, they fall out of love. Carmen’s first marriage fails, and she looks at her second as a “small mistake.” After Olivia leaves, Nick turns to prostitutes and never has a meaningful relationship again. Even Tom finds that his affair with Jean was the thing keeping his marriage together. Discuss these relationships and the dynamics within the couples.

9. Alice is deeply affected by her visit to the Anne Frank house, but when she tries to talk about it with Anneke, the curator politely changes the subject. “Anne Frank is complicated,” she says. What is it about the house that you feel touches Alice so deeply? Is this exchange applicable to Alice’s feelings about the accident?

10. When Kees Verwey sees Alice’s paintings of Casey, he says to her: “…You are honoring her with these, giving her a kind of life. What if these are the best paintings you will ever make?” Alice replies, “Then maybe not showing them is the terms of my atonement.” Do you agree with Verwey or with Alice? Do you think she should have shown them? Or do you think it would have been wrong to profit from Casey’s death, the way Tom profited from the song he writes about the accident?

11. When Nick visits Shanna Redmond, she says to him about Casey: “She was such a careless kid…Never looked both ways like I told her. You can tell them that. The others. Not that it was her fault. But it wasn’t all theirs either.” Do you think Nick ever passes this message along? Do you think it would have helped the others to hear it? Or at that point, was it meaningless, given all they had been through?

12. Alice feels Casey is dictating the paintings of her unlived life. Do you think she is? As with the ending of the book, do you feel information sometimes passes between the world of the living and that of the dead?

13. How much of our present is shadowed by our past? How long do we carry regrets forward?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Carthage 
Joyce Carol Oates, 2014
HarperCollins
768 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062298829


Summary
Zeno Mayfield's daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins his frantic search for the girl, they discover the unlikeliest of suspects—a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.

Carthage plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young corporal haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.

Dark and riveting, Carthage is a powerful novel that explores the human capacity for violence, love, and forgiveness, and asks if it's ever truly possible to come home again.. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 16, 1938
• Where—Lockport, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Syracuse Univ.; M.A., Univ. of Wisconsin
• Awards—National Book Award for Them, 1970; 14 O. Henry
   Awards; six Pushcart Prizes
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey


Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world. She has often used her supreme narrative skills to examine the dark side of middle-class Americana, and her oeuvre includes some of the finest examples of modern essays, plays, criticism, and fiction from a vast array of genres. She is still publishing with a speed and consistency of quality nearly unheard of in contemporary literature.

A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college— a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.

Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of Them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor—from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize—and her fiction turns up with regularity on the New York Times annual list of Notable Books.

On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades—familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence—she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."

Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.

Extras
• When not writing, Oates likes to take in a fight. "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost," she says in highbrow fashion of the lowbrow sport.

• Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Praise for Oates from the UK
• One of the female frontrunners for the title of Great American Novelist.— Maggie Gee, Sunday Times

• A writer of extraordinary strengths...she has dealt consistently with what is probably the great American theme— the quest for the creation of self...Her great subject, naturally, is love.—Ian Sansom, Guardian

• Her prose is peerless and her ability to make you think as she re-invents genres is unique. Few writers move so effortlessly from the gothic tale to the psychological thriller to the epic family saga to the lyrical novella. Even fewer authors can so compellingly and entertainingly tell a story.—Jackie McGlone, Scotland on Sunday

• Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman. —The Herald
(From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Oates returns with another novel that ratchets up the unsettling to her signature feverish pitch. Beginning with an attention-grabbing opener that begets addictive reading—Zeno Mayfield and a search party are on the hunt for Mayfield’s missing 19-year-old daughter.... When the truth and its fallout finally becomes clear at the end, the mood is not surprisingly claustrophobic and grim. Once again, Oates’s gift for exposing the frailty—and selfishness—of humans is on display.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Dark events in Carthage, a town in upstate New York—a war hero returning from Iraq, a broken engagement, a mysterious murder—but not everything is as it seems. Carthage seems to embody the values of small-town America, for its citizens are independent and patriotic, but in early July 2005, things start to go dreadfully wrong..... Knotted, tense, digressive and brilliant.
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)

We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.

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Cartwheel 
Jennifer duBois, 2013
Random House
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812985825


Summary
Cartwheel is a suspenseful and haunting novel of an American foreign exchange student arrested for murder, and a father trying to hold his family together.
 
When Lily Hayes arrives in Buenos Aires for her semester abroad, she is enchanted by everything she encounters: the colorful buildings, the street food, the handsome, elusive man next door. Her studious roommate Katy is a bit of a bore, but Lily didn’t come to Argentina to hang out with other Americans.
 
Five weeks later, Katy is found brutally murdered in their shared home, and Lily is the prime suspect. But who is Lily Hayes? It depends on who’s asking. As the case takes shape—revealing deceptions, secrets, and suspicious DNA—Lily appears alternately sinister and guileless through the eyes of those around her: the media, her family, the man who loves her and the man who seeks her conviction. With mordant wit and keen emotional insight, Cartwheel offers a prismatic investigation of the ways we decide what to see—and to believe—in one another and ourselves.
 
In Cartwheel, duBois delivers a novel of propulsive psychological suspense and rare moral nuance. No two readers will agree who Lily is and what happened to her roommate. Cartwheel will keep you guessing until the final page, and its questions about how well we really know ourselves will linger well beyond. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1983
• Where—Northampton, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Tufts Univeristy;
   M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Currently—lives in Texas

Jennifer duBois' writing has appeared in Playboy, The Wall Street Journal, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, The Northwest Review, ZYZZYVA, FiveChapters and elsewhere. Her short story “Wolf” was listed as a Notable Story in Best American Short Stories 2012, and her short story “A Partial History of Lost Causes,” excerpted from her novel, was one of Narrative’s Top Five Stories of 2011-2012. She completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. She currently teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University-San Marcos. (From the author's website.)

Dubois' first book, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was published in 2012; in 2013, she published Cartwheel.

Book Reviews
[T]he interests of Cartwheel are overwhelmingly literary. Events in the novel are not recounted as newsworthy in themselves, best delivered untouched; rather, DuBois wrings them for that which is universally (or at least culturally) meaningful. She uses the given story, in other words, as a thematic test case: How could a well-intentioned girl—a girl like your daughter or mine—end up looking so guilty of murder, leading millions to believe the charges? How does our American blitheness, the growing sexual confidence of (some of) our young women, the openness of speech and behavior, operate out of context? When is naïveté a kind of crime? And how is a parent implicated by a child who commits such a crime?…The writing in Cartwheel is a pleasure—electric, fine-tuned, intelligent, conflicted. The novel is engrossing, and its portraiture hits delightfully and necessarily close to home.
Amity Gaige - New York Times Book Review


A convincing, compelling tale.... The story plays out in all its well-told complexity.
New York Daily News


Something more provocative, meaningful and suspenseful than the tabloids and social media could provide.... [DuBois] tells a great story.... The power of Cartwheel resides in duBois’ talent for understanding how the foreign world can illuminate the most deeply held secrets we keep from others, and ourselves.
Chicago Tribune


A smart, literary thriller [for] fans of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
Huffington Post

 
[You’ll] break your own record of pages read per minute as you tear through this book.
Marie Claire
 

[A] gripping, gorgeously written novel.... The emotional intelligence in Cartwheel is so sharp it’s almost ruthless—a tabloid tragedy elevated to high art.
Entertainment Weekly


Taking themes that were “loosely inspired by the story of Amanda Knox,” Cartwheel follows American exchange student Lily Hayes, who has been accused of murdering her roommate.... While muddying the waters of right and wrong is almost always a valiant cause in literature, this novel reads more like an intellectual exercise in examining all the different angles rather than an emotional engagement with human beings.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [DuBois] does an excellent job of creating and maintaining a pervasive feeling of foreboding and suspense.... An acute psychological study of character that rises to the level of the philosophica.... Cartwheel is very much its own individual work of the author’s creative imagination.
Booklist


Attempts to cannibalize Amanda [Knox's] story....Lily herself is a not very interesting addition to those thousands of young Americans looking to spread their wings in an exotic locale. Readers are meant to presume her innocence while retaining a tiny sliver of doubt.... A tangled tale that leaves protagonist Lily, and the crime, unilluminated.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The first paragraph of Cartwheel ends with a chilling statement: “The things that go wrong are rarely the things you’ve thought to worry about.” Why do you think the author makes such a pronouncement at the beginning of the novel? What does she mean? Is this true in your life?

2. The story in Cartwheel is very much of our time. Lily’s case becomes an international sensation because of Facebook, blogs, and the way shocking news and information can travel around the world within minutes. Social media plays a big role in Cartwheel. Does this change your view of social media? How do you use social media to share details of your life? What about your family members?

3. Why do you think Jennifer duBois chose to tell the story from four points of view? How does that affect the experience of reading it?

4. At one point, Lily’s sister Anna says “everyone wants to love Lily,” and that she’s always played by different rules. Why does Anna think this?

5. Lily’s father, Andrew, believes “everything vile about your children was to some degree vile about yourself.” Is this a fair statement? Do Lily’s parents fail her, or is this parental guilt?

6. What impact does her sister’s ordeal have on Anna?

7. The title of the book comes from the cartwheel Lily turned between interrogation sessions. Why did the author choose this image as significant?

8. In what ways are Lily and Katy different? Why does Lily feel Katy’s life was “easy”? Is she being fair?

9. Have you, or someone you know, studied abroad? Do you think it benefits college students to visit other countries? Why do you think Lily wanted to study abroad? What was she looking for?

10. Eduardo, attorney for the prosecution, believes Lily is guilty but that she doesn’t understand why what she did was wrong. Do you agree?

11. Sebastien is an enigmatic character. What do you think Lily is attracted to about him? Where do you think his addiction for obscuring half-irony comes from? What consequences does it have for the unfolding of events?

12. The author uses ambiguity to tell this story. How does that affect your understanding of what happened? Which character do you trust the most?

13. Lily calls her family “repressed,” saying they never learned how to mourn their first child, the sister who died before Lily and Anna were born. Why does she say she and Anna were treated like “replacement children”?

14. Do you believe the whole story comes out at Lily’s trial?

(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Case Histories 
Kate Atkinson, 2004
Little, Brown & Co.
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316033480


Summary
A triumphant new novel from award-winner Kate Atkinson: a breathtaking story of families divided, love lost and found, and the mysteries of fate.

Case One: Olivia Land, youngest and most beloved of the Land girls, goes missing in the night and is never seen again. Thirty years later, two of her surviving sisters unearth a shocking clue to Olivia's disappearance among the clutter of their childhood home...

Case Two: Theo delights in his daughter Laura's wit, effortless beauty, and selfless love. But her first day as an associate in his law firm is also the day when Theo's world turns upside down...

Case Three: Michelle looks around one day and finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making. A very needy baby and a very demanding husband make her every waking moment a reminder that somewhere, somehow, she'd made a grave mistake and would spend the rest of her life paying for it—until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.

As Private Detective Jackson Brodie investigates all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge. Inextricably caught up in his clients grief, joy, and desire, Jackson finds their unshakable need for resolution very much like his own.

Kate Atkinson's celebrated talent makes for a novel that positively sparkles with surprise, comedy, tragedy, and constant, page-turning delight. (From the publisher.)

This is the first in the Jackson Brodie series, followed by One Good Turn and When Will There be Good News.

Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where—York, England, UK
• Education—M.A., Dundee University
• Awards—Whitbread Award; Woman's Own Short Story Award; Ian St. James Award;
   Saltire Book of the Year Award; Prix Westminster
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK


Kate Atkinson was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature which she failed at the viva stage. During her final year of this course, she was married for the first time, although the marriage lasted only two years.

After leaving the university, she took on a variety of miscellaneous jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, Yorkshire for a time, before moving to Edinburgh, where she taught at Dundee University and began writing short stories. She now lives in Edinburgh.

Writing
She initially wrote for women's magazines after winning the 1986 Woman's Own Short Story Competition. She was runner-up for the Bridport Short Story Prize in 1990 and won an Ian St James Award in 1993 for her short-story "Karmic Mothers," which she later adapted for BBC2 television as part of its Tartan Shorts series.

Atkinson's breakthrough was with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year award, ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins biography of William Ewart Gladstone. The book has been adapted for radio, theatre and television. She has since written several more novels, short stories and a play. Case Histories (2004) was described by Stephen King as "the best mystery of the decade." The book won the Saltire Book of the Year Award and the Prix Westminster.

Her work is often celebrated for its wit, wisdom and subtle characterisation, and the surprising twists and plot turns. Four of her novels have featured the popular former detective Jackson Brodie—Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News (2008), and Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). She has shown that, stylistically, she is also a comic novelist who often juxtaposes mundane everyday life with fantastic magical events, a technique that contributes to her work's pervasive magic realism.

Life After Life (2013) revolves around Ursula Todd's continual birth and rebirth. Janet Maslin of the New York Times called it "a big book that defies logic, chronology and even history in ways that underscore its author's fully untethered imagination."

A God in Ruins (2015), the companion book to Life After Life, follows Ursula's brother Todd who survived the war, only to succumb to disillusionment and guilt at having survived.

Atkinson was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to literature. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The lifelike characters in Case Histories are what make it such a compelling hybrid: part complex family drama, part mystery. It winds up having more depth and vividness than ordinary thrillers and more thrills than ordinary fiction, with a constant awareness of perils swirling beneath its surface.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Certain characters are the stock in trade of detective novels: innocent female murder victims, embittered spinsters, wives with secrets, teenage runaways, sexy old actresses and men who feel driven to try, over and over, to protect or avenge the downtrodden. Kate Atkinson's latest novel contains all these characters, which might suggest it's just another variation on a host of well-worn themes—but, amazingly enough, this cast, as familiar as it is, still has the power to ensnare us. In fact, Case Histories is so exuberant, so empathetic, that it makes most murder-mystery page-turners feel as lifeless as the corpses they're strewn with.
Jacqueline Carey - New York Times Book Review


Breaking detective-thriller form, Case Histories is told from multiple points of view, reducing the burden on Jackson to "solve" the crimes for us and letting each character bloom in the light of the author's sharp, observant prose. That's something that the genre's hard-boiled forefathers would never have done; for them, the ratiocinative novel was a one-man job, and sympathetic characters just gummed up the works. Kate Atkinson, though, seems to have intuited that the most compelling mystery of all isn't necessarily whodunit, but rather howtodealwithit.
Jeff Turrentine - Washington Post


In this ambitious fourth novel from Whitbread winner Atkinson, private detective Jackson Brodie-ex-cop, ex-husband and weekend dad-takes on three cases involving past crimes that occurred in and around London. The first case introduces two middle-aged sisters who, after the death of their vile, distant father, look again into the disappearance of their beloved sister Olivia, last seen at three years old, while they were camping under the stars during an oppressive heat wave. A retired lawyer who lives only on the fumes of possible justice next enlists Jackson's aid in solving the brutal killing of his grown daughter 10 years earlier. In the third dog-eared case file, the sibling of an infamous ax-bludgeoner seeks a reunion with her niece, who as a baby was a witness to murder. Jackson's reluctant persistence heats up these cold cases and by happenstance leads him to reassess his own painful history. The humility of the extraordinary, unabashed characters is skillfully revealed with humor and surprise. Atkinson contrasts the inevitable results of family dysfunction with random fate, gracefully weaving the three stories into a denouement that taps into collective wishful thinking and suggests that warmth and safety may be found in the aftermath of blood and abandonment. Atkinson's meaty, satisfying prose will attract many eager readers. Atkinson crosses genres, attracting readers of literary fiction as well as thrillers.
Publishers Weekly


Edinburgh resident Atkinson has been touted for her clever subversion of the standard family saga (the Whitbread Prize-winning Behind the Scenes at the Museum), as well as her playful parody and magic realism (Not the End of the World). Now she turns her deft hand to the hard-boiled detective genre and wreaks a similarly wonderful havoc. Cambridge P.I. and Francophile Jackson Brodie serves as the link among three interwoven tales. Red herrings abound as Jackson plows through the sad cases of a missing toddler, a young woman brutally killed while temping at her father's law firm, and an overwrought mother driven to ax murder. The relatives of the victims, Jackson's motley clientele, prove to be alternatively pitiable and hilarious but always painfully human. Superfluous plot elements involving attempts on Brodie's life and the running commentary on Brodie's musical tastes may lead to comparisons with Ian Rankin's Inspector John Rebus series, but only briefly, for this is a very new world of old crimes. Recommended for larger fiction collections. —Jenn B. Stidham, Harris Cty. P.L., Houston
Library Journal


After two self-indulgent detours, Atkinson proves that her Whitbread Award-winning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996), was no fluke with a novel about three interconnected mysteries. They seem totally unrelated at first to private detective Jackson Brodie, hired by separate individuals in Cambridge, England, to investigate long-dormant cases. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared from a tent in her family's backyard in 1970; 34 years later, her sisters Amelia and Julia discover Olivia's stuffed toy in their recently deceased father's study and want Jackson to find out what he had to do with the disappearance. Theo Wyre's beloved 18-year-old daughter Laura was murdered by a knife-wielding lunatic in 1994, and he too hires Jackson to crack this unsolved murder. Michelle was also 18 when she went to jail in 1979 for killing her husband with an ax while their infant daughter wailed in the playpen; she vanished after serving her time, but Shirley Morrison asks Jackson to find, not her sister Michelle, but the niece she promised to raise, then was forced to hand over to grandparents. The detective, whose bitter ex-wife uses Jackson's profound love for their eight-year-old daughter to torture him, finds all these stories of dead and/or missing girls extremely unsettling; we learn toward the end why the subject of young women in peril is particularly painful for him. Atkinson has always been a gripping storyteller, and her complicated narrative crackles with the earthy humor, vibrant characterizations, and shrewd social observations that enlivened her first novel but were largely swamped by postmodern game-playing in Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000). Here, she craftsa compulsive page-turner that looks deep into the heart of sadness, cruelty, and loss, yet ultimately grants her charming p.i. (and most of the other appealingly offbeat characters, including one killer) a chance at happiness and some measure of reconciliation with the past. Wonderful fun and very moving: it's a pleasure to see this talented writer back on form.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. The three cases that open Case Histories are at first quite separate, and leave you wondering how Atkinson is going to pull it all together into one story. You might discuss whether she is successful at doing that—and how.

2. Case Histories has three unsolved crimes and has a private eye as hero. Kate Atkinson is known as a 'literary writer' and won the Whitbread Prize for her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. How is Case Histories different from a traditional detectvie novel—or is it?

3. Jackson believes "that his job was to help people be good rather than punish them for being bad." Another discussion point would be whether you think he is a moral character, and how you feel the revelation of the tragedy in his own past illuminates his actions in the novel.

4. To Jackson, it seems as if everyone he encounters has lost someone or something. One of Kate Atkinson's recurrent themes is that of lost children. In spite of her wicked sense of humour, she creates an overwhelming sense of tension in this novel. Is it that this theme speaks directly to the lost child deep inside every one of us?

5. "Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and the implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on." Is Kate Atkinson being mischievous here, or is this statement true of this novel?
(Questions issued by Transworld Publishers.)

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Casebook 
Mona Simpson, 2014
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385351416


Summary
A powerful new novel about a young boy’s quest to uncover the mysteries of his unraveling family. What he discovers turns out to be what he least wants to know: the inner workings of his parents’ lives. And even then he can’t stop searching.

Miles Adler-Hart starts eavesdropping to find out what his mother is planning for his life. When he learns instead that his parents are separating, his investigation deepens, and he enlists his best friend, Hector, to help. Both boys are in thrall to Miles’s unsuspecting mother, Irene, who is “pretty for a mathematician.” They rifle through her dresser drawers, bug her telephone lines, and strip-mine her computer, only to find that all clues lead them to her bedroom, and put them on the trail of a mysterious stranger from Washington, D.C.

Their amateur detective work starts innocently but quickly takes them to the far reaches of adult privacy as they acquire knowledge that will affect the family’s well-being, prosperity, and sanity. Burdened with this powerful information, the boys struggle to deal with the existence of evil and concoct modes of revenge on their villains that are both hilarious and naïve. Eventually, haltingly, they learn to offer animal comfort to those harmed and to create an imaginative path to their own salvation.

Casebook brilliantly reveals an American family both  both coming apart at the seams and,  simultaneously, miraculously reconstituting itself to sustain its members through their ultimate trial. Mona Simpson, once again, demonstrates her stunning mastery, giving us a boy hero for our times whose story remains with us long after the novel is over and we’ve read the novel’s final page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 14, 1957
• Where—Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Berkeley; M.F.A.,
   Columbia University
• Awards— Whiting Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Santa Monica, California


Mona E. Simpson (born Mona Jandali) is an American author. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard College. She won the Whiting Prize for her first novel, Anywhere but Here (1986). It was a popular success and adapted as a film by the same name, released in 1999. She then wrote a sequel for it, The Lost Father in 1992. Her novel Off Keck Road (2000) won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

She is also the biological younger sister of the late Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, whom she did not meet until she was 25 years old.

Early life
Mona Jandali was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Her father Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, originally from Homs, Syria, was a cousin of composer and pianist Malek Jandali. Abdulfattah taught at the University of Wisconsin and later made a career in the food and beverage industry. Her mother, Joanne Carole Schieble, was his student; however, they were the same age because Jandali had received his PhD at a young age. Schieble became a speech language pathologist. They divorced in 1962 and Joanne lost touch with Jandali. Joanne remarried and Mona was given the last name of her stepfather, Simpson.

Career
Simpson received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. After graduating from Columbia, she worked as an editor for Paris Review. In 1994, she returned to Los Angeles with her husband. In 2001, she started teaching creative writing at UCLA, and also has an appointment at Bard College in New York.

Simpson's novels are a mixture of events from her life and pure fiction.[1][7][8] Her first novel, Anywhere But Here (1986), was a critical and popular success, winning the Whiting Prize. In describing her intentions for the novel, Simpson stated:

I wanted to write about American mythologies, American yearnings that might be responses, delayed or exaggerated but in some way typical, to the political and social truths of our part of the world in our century. But I wrote very personally about one family. I think it takes a long time before a crisis—like AIDS—enters the culture to a point where responses exist in a character, where personal gestures are both individual and resonant in a larger way.

It was adapted as the 1999 film Anywhere But Here, starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. A Regular Guy (1996) explores the strained relationship of a Silicon Valley tycoon with a daughter born out of wedlock, whom he did not acknowledge. Off Keck Road (2000), portraying decades in the lives of three women in the Midwest, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. Stacey D'Erasmo states that "Off Keck Road marks the place where origin leaves off and improvisation begins."

Simpson's most recent novel, My Hollywood, was published in 2011. It explores the complex relationships, issues of class, and perspectives of two women, a European-American composer and mother in her 30s, and her immigrant nanny from the Philippines, who cares for her son and has five of her own in the Philippines whom she is supporting. The novel alternates between the voices of the two women, contrasting their worlds. Liesl Schillinger suggests that the novel is a "compassionate fictional exploration of this complicated global relationship, Simpson assesses the human cost that the child-care bargain exacts on the amah, on her employer and on the children of both." Ron Charles further argues that:

What really invigorates this novel, though, is the way it alternates between Claire's chapters and chapters narrated by Lola, her 50-year-old Filipino nanny. I was worried early on that Lola would be a Southeast Asian version of the Magical Negro, who exists merely to help some self-absorbed white person reach enlightenment. But she's entirely her own wonderful, troubled character, and her relationship with Claire remains complex and unresolved.

Finding family
Abdulfattah "John" Jandali and Joanne Carole Schieble had a baby boy in 1955 prior to both their marriage and Mona's birth, but gave him up for adoption. The boy, computer pioneer Steve Jobs, was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs. In the 1980s, Jobs found his birth mother, by then Joanne Simpson, who told him that Mona was his biological sister. The siblings met for the first time in 1985 and developed a close friendship. They kept their relationship secret until 1986, when Simpson introduced Jobs as her brother at her book party for her first novel, Anywhere But Here. The two forged a relationship and he regularly visited her in Manhattan. Simpson said, "My brother and I are very close; I admire him enormously." Jobs said, "We're family. She's one of my best friends in the world. I call her and talk to her every couple of days."

Simpson had already been looking for their father and found him, then managing a coffee shop. When she reached Jandali, he said, "I wish you could have seen me when I was running a bigger restaurant." Jandali told Simpson that he had once managed a popular Mediterranean restaurant in Silicon Valley. "Everybody used to come there," the Jobs biographer, Walter Isaacson, says Jandali told Simpson. "Even Steve Jobs used to eat there. Yeah, he was a great tipper."

In a taped interview aired on 60 Minutes, Jobs said: "When I was looking for my biological mother, obviously, you know, I was looking for my biological father at the same time, and I learned a little bit about him and I didn't like what I learned. I asked her (Mona) to not tell him that we ever met...not tell him anything about me."

In her eulogy to Jobs (New York Times, October 30, 2011), Simpson wrote:

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people. Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.

Marriage and family
In 1993, Simpson married the television writer and producer Richard Appel, and they had two children together, Gabriel and Grace. Appel, a writer for The Simpsons, used his wife's name for Homer Simpson's mother, beginning with the episode "Mother Simpson." They later divorced and Simpson currently lives in Santa Monica with her two children.

Awards
• 1986, Whiting Prize
• 1987, Hodder Fellowship (Princeton University)
• 1988, Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1995, Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fellowship
• 2001, Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize
• 2001, Finalist: PEN/Faulkner award
• 2008, Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/03/2014.)

See New York Times article on Mona Simpson.

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) From an early age, Miles senses the vulnerability of his mother, a recently divorced mathematician, and throughout his childhood and adolescence feels the need to look out for her. When Irene falls in love with Eli Lee, Miles is highly suspicious.... Ultimately, this is a story about a son’s love for his mother, and Simpson’s portrayal of utter loyalty is infectious.
Publishers Weekly


Having won honors ranging from a Whiting Writer's Award to an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts, the beloved Simpson shows up with a young protagonist named Miles Adler-Rich, who's compelled by the recent separation of his parents to spy on them with the help of friend Hector.... The scary secrets they learn give the boys their first real lesson in good and evil.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Ensnaring, witty, and perceptive.... This exceptionally incisive, fine–tuned and charming novel unfolds gracefully as [Simpson] brings fresh understanding and keen humor to the complexities intrinsic to each stage of life and love. —Donna Seaman
Booklist


A child of divorce turns private eye in the latest well-observed study of domestic dysfunction.... Simpson's sixth novel...features a teenage narrator struggling to comprehend a parental split. But the new book is...framed as a detective story about discovering the deceptions that can swirl around relationships.... [Simpson's] command of the story is rock-solid. A clever twist on a shopworn theme by a top-shelf novelist.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the opening note from Hershel Geschwind of Neverland Comics, Hershel writes that Hector and Miles will continue to go back and forth with this manuscript “until they get their story straight or until they grow up, whichever comes last, or never.” How different do you think the boys’ accounts are of what happened, and what role do Hector’s footnotes play throughout the manuscript? What exactly do you think Herschel means by “grow up”?

2. This book is in many ways a coming-of age -story, but Miles learns many of his life lessons by spying on his mother, not through his own actual experience. Why do you think the author has chosen to focus so extensively on the effects of adult lives—the secret lives of parents—on their children?

3. How the motto of Miles’s and Hector’s school—motto, "is it true, is it kind, is it necessary? Will it improve on the silence?”shape their view of the world? What impact does Eli have on this view?

4. Did Miles’s extensive involvement with his mother’s personal life have a negative impact on his ability to focus on his own experiences, or did he gain greater insight into what it means to love than he might have otherwise?

5. What do we learn about Irene and about her relationships with Carey and Eli—and about adult lives in general—that we might not find out about were the novel not told through Miles’s perspective? What do we gain? Do you think most teenagers are as fascinated by the lives of their parents as Miles and Hector are?

6. Miles mentions that when Eli promises to put up Christmas lights, it was the “first feeling I had for Eli. We could be men who did that shit. I liked the idea of putting up lights ourselves” (page 28). What do the Christmas lights represent to Miles?

7. Why is Hector just as invested in uncovering the truth about Eli as Miles is? Or is he even more invested?

8. What is the significance of the notes on the kitchen blackboard? How do the quotes act as a reflection of what is going on in the story, whether or not Irene is aware of it at the time? For example, on page 41, what is the significance of the quote “benighted: in a state of pitiful or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance.” Do you think Eli ever found Irene’s lack of awareness of his own deceit contemptible?

9. Several times throughout the novel Eli mentions his love for animals. The only stories he tells that Miles never doubts involve this deep love. Miles says at one point that he saw Eli holding the dead kittens, and he knew how to do it. Do you think the story about the sick cat, Coco, was true? Eli seems to be able to care for animals and not people. What does this say about who he is?

10. Does Eli ever really love Irene, Miles, and the Boops? What were his motives for stringing them along, and, do you think he ever believed the outcome would be different than it was?

11. On page 104 Miles describes romance as seeming like “friendship, but with a fleck of sparkle.” How do Miles’s feelings about romantic and platonic love change over the course of the novel? What does he learn from his parents’ relationship, from Eli and the Mims’ relationship, and from his friendship with Hector? Do you think Miles ever really questions his own sexuality?

12. On page 108, Miles says that when he “thinks of [his] life as a boy, it ended there that night, while the Mims stared out at the Pacific Ocean with its barreling waves, the world indifferent to our losses.” What causes this turning point?

13. What role does Ben Orion play? Why does he help Miles and Hector without asking for payment?

14. How does hearing directly from an older Hector through his comments in footnotes to the text alter or inform your impression of him as a character? What, if anything, does it bring to light about his relationship with Miles? Did it surprise you that he got into drugs when he went off to school? Do you think one of them needed the other more, and if so, why?

15. Why do you think Irene puts up with all of Eli’s broken promises? What is it about him that keeps drawing her back, despite never seeing where he lives, never meeting his child or his brother, and the fact that he never follows through on any of the futures he proposes, even with things as small as the buying of silverware?

16. On page 181, at Irene’s forty-fifth birthday party, Eli makes this speech: “All of you love Reen for many reasons.... But I, I love her, I love her because I, I can’t help loving her. No matter what ever happens, I am and I will always be in love with Irene Adler.” What does he mean, and what is it about Irene that makes Eli love her, or at least claim to love her, so much?

17. Who is “C” in Jean’s book dedication? Why do you think she tolerates Eli’s transgressions, and how much do you think she actually knows about them? Do you think she discovered Irene on her own? Do you think that Eli would eventually have told her?

18. What leads Miles to say that “hope for happiness is happiness” (page 229)? Do you think this statement is true?

19. Why do you think Miles lies to Eli about his mother dying in the arms of a man she loved when he runs into him years later?

20. Mona Simpson is known as an author of voice. How do you think the voice of Miles stacks up? Does he feel real?

21. What do you think Irene got out of her relationship with Eli? Does she, and do we, learn anything about her through her sexual experiences with him that give insight into who she is, or into what may have gone wrong with her marriage? Do you think she ultimately found happiness?

22. Bonus question 1: Did you notice parallels to Sherlock Holmes? Which boy is Holmes and which is Watson? Did their identities keep shifting, as they disguise their real details, change their appearances and hair colors?

23. Bonus question 2: Why do you think the heroine is called Irene Adler?

24. Bonus recipe: OLIVE OIL BUNDT CAKE (This is adapted from the pastry chef at Maialino—imagine Marge barging into Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Park Hotel restaurant and getting the men in aprons to scribble this on a napkin)

CAKE
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 cup whole milk
• 3 large eggs
• 2 tablespoons grated orange zest
• 1/4 cup Grand Marnier

1. Preheat the oven to 350°. Spray a 10-inch cake pan with cooking spray and line the bottom with parchment paper. In a bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and powder. In another bowl, whisk the olive oil, milk, eggs, orange zest and Grand Marnier. Add the dry ingredients; whisk until just combined.

2. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour, until the top is golden and a cake tester comes out clean. Transfer the cake to a rack and let cool for 30 minutes. Run a knife around the edge of the pan, invert the cake onto the rack and let cool completely, 2 hours.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling, 2012
Little, Brown & Company
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316228534


Summary
When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.

Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.

Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils.... Pagford is not what it first seems.

And the empty seat left by Barry on the town's council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 31, 1965
• Where—Chipping Sodbury near Bristol, England, UK
• Education—Exeter University
• Awards—3 Nestle Smarties Awards; British Book Award-
   Children's Book of the Year; British Book Awards- Author of the Year;
   British Book Awards- Book of the Year.
• Currently—lives in Perthshire, Scotland and London, England.


Joanne "Jo" Rowling, better known under the pen name J. K. Rowling, is a British author known as the creator of the Harry Potter fantasy series, the idea for which was conceived while on a train trip from Manchester to London in 1990. The Potter books have gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, sold more than 400 million copies, and been the basis for a popular series of films. Rowling is perhaps equally famous for her "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on welfare to multi-millionaire status within five years. As of March 2010, when its latest world billionaires list was published, Forbes estimated Rowling's net worth to be $1 billion. The 2008 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £560 million ($798 million), ranking her as the twelfth richest woman in Great Britain. Forbes ranked Rowling as the forty-eighth most powerful celebrity of 2007, and Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fandom. She has become a notable philanthropist, supporting such charities as Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain, and the Children's High Level Group.

Early years
Rowling was born to Peter James Rowling and Anne Rowling (nee Volant), on 31 July 1965 in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, 10 miles (16.1 km) northeast of Bristol. The family moved to the nearby village Winterbourne when Rowling was four. She attended St Michael's Primary School, a school founded by abolitionist William Wilberforce. (The school's headmaster has been suggested as the inspiration for Harry Potter's Albus Dumbledore).

As a child, Rowling often wrote fantasy stories, which she would read to her sister. "I can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called "Rabbit." He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee." When she was a young teenager, her great aunt gave her a very old copy of Jessica Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels. Mitford became Rowling's heroine, and Rowling subsequently read all of her books.

She attended secondary school at Wyedean School and College, where her mother, Anne, had worked as a technician in the Science Department. Rowling has said of her adolescence, "Hermione [A bookish, know-it-all Harry Potter character] is loosely based on me. She's a caricature of me when I was eleven, which I'm not particularly proud of." Sean Harris, her best friend in the Upper Sixth owned a turquoise Ford Anglia, which she says inspired the one in her books. "Ron Weasley [Harry Potter's best friend] isn't a living portrait of Sean, but he really is very Sean-ish."

Rowling read for a BA in French and Classics at the University of Exeter. After a year of study in Paris, Rowling moved to London to work as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International.

In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. In December of that same year, Rowling’s mother died, after a ten-year battle with multiple sclerosis, a death that heavily affected her writing: she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.

Rowling then moved to Porto, Portugal to teach English as a foreign language. While there she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes in 1992. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born in 1993 in Portugal. The couple separated in November 1993. In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.

After Jessica's birth and the separation from her husband, Rowling had left her teaching job in Portugal. In order to teach in Scotland she would need a postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE), requiring a full-time, year-long course of study. She began this course in August 1995, after completing her first novel while having survived on state welfare support.

She wrote in many cafes, especially Nicolson's Cafe, whenever she could get Jessica to fall asleep. As she stated on the American TV program A&E Biography, one of the reasons she wrote in cafes was not because her flat had no heat, but because taking her baby out for a walk was the best way to make her fall asleep.

Harry Potter books
In 1995, Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on an old manual typewriter. The book was submitted to twelve publishing houses, all of which rejected the manuscript. A year later she was finally given the green light (and a £1500 advance) by Bloomsbury, a small British publishing house in London, England. The decision to publish Rowling's book apparently owes much to Alice Newton, the eight-year-old daughter of Bloomsbury’s chairman, who was given the first chapter to review by her father and immediately demanded the next.

Although Bloomsbury agreed to publish the book, her editor Barry Cunningham says that he advised Rowling to get a day job, since she had little chance of making money in children’s books. Soon after, in 1997, Rowling received an £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council to enable her to continue writing. The following spring, an auction was held in the United States for the rights to publish the novel, and was won by Scholastic Inc., for $105,000. Rowling has said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.

In June 1997, Bloomsbury published Philosopher’s Stone with an initial print-run of 1000 copies, five hundred of which were distributed to libraries. Today, such copies are valued between £16,000 and £25,000. Five months later, the book won its first award, a Nestle Smarties Book Prize. In February, the novel won the prestigious British Book Award for Children’s Book of the Year, and later, the Children’s Book Award. Its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, was published in July, 1998.

In December 1999, the third novel, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, won the Smarties Prize, making Rowling the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth Harry Potter novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance. In January 2000, Prisoner of Azkaban won the inaugural Whitbread Children’s Book of the Year award, though it lost the Book of the Year prize to Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.

The fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was released simultaneously in the UK and the US on 8 July 2000, and broke sales records in both countries. Some 372,775 copies of the book were sold in its first day in the UK, almost equalling the number Prisoner of Azkaban sold during its first year. In the US, the book sold three million copies in its first 48 hours, smashing all literary sales records. Rowling admitted that she had had a moment of crisis while writing the novel; "Halfway through writing Four, I realised there was a serious fault with the plot....I've had some of my blackest moments with this book..... One chapter I rewrote 13 times, though no-one who has read it can spot which one or know the pain it caused me." Rowling was named author of the year in the 2000 British Book Awards.

A wait of three years occurred between the release of Goblet of Fire and the fifth Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This gap led to press speculation that Rowling had developed writer's block, speculations she fervently denied. Rowling later admitted that writing the book was a chore. "I think Phoenix could have been shorter", she told Lev Grossman, "I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end."

The sixth book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, was released on 16 July 2005. It too broke all sales records, selling nine million copies in its first 24 hours of release. While writing, she told a fan online, "Book six has been planned for years, but before I started writing seriously I spend two months re-visiting the plan and making absolutely sure I knew what I was doing." She noted on her website that the opening chapter of book six, which features a conversation between the Minister of Magic and the British Prime Minister, had been intended as the first chapter first for Philosopher's Stone, then Chamber of Secrets then Prisoner of Azkaban. In 2006, Half-Blood Prince received the Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July, 2007, (0:00 BST) and broke its predecessor's record as the fastest-selling book of all time. It sold 11 million copies in the first day of release in the United Kingdom and United States. She has said that the last chapter of the book was written "in something like 1990", as part of her earliest work on the entire series. During a year period when Rowling was completing the last book, she allowed herself to be filmed for a documentary which aired in Britain on ITV on 30 December 2007. It was entitled J K Rowling... A Year In The Life and showed her returning to her old Edinburgh tenement flat where she lived, and completed the first Harry Potter book. Re-visiting the flat for the first time reduced her to tears, saying it was "really where I turned my life around completely."

Harry Potter is now a global brand worth an estimated £7 billion ($15 billion), and the last four Harry Potter books have consecutively set records as the fastest-selling books in history. The series, totalling 4,195 pages, has been translated, in whole or in part, into 65 languages.

The Harry Potter books have also gained recognition for sparking an interest in reading among the young at a time when children were thought to be abandoning books for computers and television, although the series' overall impact on children's reading habits has been questioned.

Life after Harry Potter
Forbes has named Rowling as the first person to become a U.S.-dollar billionaire by writing books, the second-richest female entertainer and the 1,062nd richest person in the world. When first listed as a billionaire by Forbes in 2004, Rowling disputed the calculations and said she had plenty of money, but was not a billionaire. In addition, the 2008 Sunday Times Rich List named Rowling the 144th richest person in Britain. In 2001, Rowling purchased a luxurious nineteenth-century estate house, Killiechassie House, on the banks of the River Tay, near Aberfeldy, in Perth and Kinross, Scotland. Rowling also owns a home in Merchiston, Edinburgh, and a £4.5 million ($9 million) Georgian house in Kensington, West London, (on a street with 24-hour security).

On 26 December 2001, Rowling married Neil Michael Murray (born 30 June 1971), an anaesthetist, in a private ceremony at her Aberfeldy home. Their son was born in 2003 and a daughter in 2005.

In the UK, Rowling has received honorary degrees from St Andrews University, the University of Edinburgh, Napier University, the University of Exeter and the University of Aberdeen; and in the US, from Harvard. She has been awarded the Légion d'honneur by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. (During the Elysée Palace ceremony, she revealed that her maternal French grandfather had also received the Légion d'honneur for his bravery during World War I.) According to Matt Latimer, a former White House administrator for President George W. Bush, Rowling was turned down for the Presidential Medal of Freedom because administration officials believed that the Harry Potter series promoted witchcraft.

Subsequent writing
Rowling has stated that she plans to continue writing, preferably under a pseudonym. In 2012, however, under her own name, she published her first novels for adults, The Casual Vacancy. Although she "thinks it's unlikely" that she will write another Harry Potter, an "encyclopedia" of wizarding along with unpublished notes may be published sometime in the future.

Using the pen name "Robert Galbraith," Rowling published The Cuckoo's Calling in 2013. It reached the top of the New York Times Best Sellers list within weeks. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The Casual Vacancy, Rowling’s much-­anticipated departure from the genre of children’s fantasy, is a sprawling homage to the Victorian protest novel.... Rowling has clearly thought long and felt deeply about the ills of modern society. Her success has given her a platform, and she intends to use it.... At times, though, it feels as if everything Rowling ever wanted to say about anything has been thrown together here, without taking care to determine whether all these ideas detract from or complement one another. Editing occasionally involves saving a novelist from him- or herself.... A thoughtful edit might have removed many of the stylistic slippages. Rowling is at the height of her creative powers: there might have been a good, possibly even great, 300-page social novel inside the 500-page tear-­jerker we have instead.
New York Times Book Review


A positively propulsive read.
Wall Street Journal

This book represents a truckload of shrewdness.... There were sentences I underlined for the sheer purpose of figuring out how English words could be combined so delightfully.... Genuinely moving.
Washington Post


An insanely compelling page-turner.... The Casual Vacancy is a comedy, but a comedy of the blackest sort, etched with acid and drawn with pitch.... Rowling proves ever dexterous at launching multiple plot lines that roar along simultaneously, never entangling them except when she means to. She did not become the world's bestselling author by accident. She knows down in her bones how to make you keep turning the pages.
The Daily Beast


Rowling knows how to write a twisty, involving plot.... She is clearly a skilled writer.
Huffington Post


The Casual Vacancy is a complete joy to read.... A stunning, brilliant, outrageously gripping and entertaining evocation of British society today.
The Mirror (UK)


A study of provincial life, with a large cast and multiple, interlocking plots, drawing inspiration from Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot.... The Casual Vacancy immerses the reader in a richly peopled, densely imagined world.... Intelligent, workmanlike, and often funny.
The Guardian (UK)


A vivid read with great, memorable characters and a truly emotional payoff.... Rowling captures the humanity in everyone, even if that humanity is not always a pretty sight.
People


On the face of it, Rowling’s first adult book is very different from the Harry Potter books that made her rich and famous. It’s resolutely unmagical: the closest thing to wizardry is the ability to hack into the amateurish Pagford Parish Council Web site. Instead of a battle for worldwide domination, there’s a fight over a suddenly empty seat on that Council, the vacancy of the title. Yet despite the lack of invisibility cloaks and pensieves, Pagford isn’t so different from Harry’s world. There’s a massive divide between the haves and the have-nots—the residents of the Fields, the council flats that some want to push off onto a neighboring county council. When Councilor Barry Fairbrother—born in Fields but now a middle-class Pagforder—dies suddenly, the fight gets uglier. In tiny Pagford, and at its school, which caters to rich and poor alike, everyone is connected: obstreperous teenager Krystal Weedon, the sole functioning member of her working-class family, hooks up with the middle-class son of her guidance counselor; the social worker watching over Krystal’s drug-addled mother dates the law partner of the son of the dead man’s fiercest Council rival; Krystal’s great-grandmother’s doctor was Fairbrother’s closest ally; the daughters of the doctor and the social worker work together, along with the best friend of Krystal’s hookup; and so on. Rowling is relentlessly competent: all these people and their hatreds and hopes are established and mixed together. Secrets are revealed, relationships twist and break, and the book rolls toward its awful, logical climax with aplomb. As in the Harry Potter books, children make mistakes and join together with a common cause, accompanied here by adults, some malicious, some trying yet failing. Minus the magic, though, good and evil are depressingly human, and while the characters are all well drawn and believable, they aren’t much fun.
Publishers Weekly

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 The Casual Vacancy:

1. Before reading, did you have certain expectations for this book based on the Harry Potter series? If so, does The Casual Vacancy meet these expectations?

2. The book has more than 30 main characters. Did you have trouble keeping them and storylines in order?

3. Do you think the profanity, violence and sex is excessive and sensational? Is Rowling trying to prove that she can write for adults or does it enhance the plot?

4. Which storyline with which characters is your favorite and why? Least favorite?

5. Rowling describes the book as a "comic tragedy". What does that mean? Some have talked about the wit, others described the lack of it. Do you find her wit on display in the book?
 
6. Many reviewers and readers complain that the plot takes is slow to get off the ground and drags in some parts. What do you think? Is The Casual Vacancy too long at 500+ pages?

7. Before the success of Harry Potter, Rowling had experiences with poverty. Does knowing this increase the creditability of the Krystal character?

8. In many interviews, Rowling states that she felt she "had to write" this book and that it's very personal to her. Several characters and experiences can be paralled to her life. For example, Howard Mollinson and Simon Price are her estranged real-life father; Gavin is her first husband; Kay Bawden is a young, single J.K. Do you see any of your own relationships in the book? Does the story cause you to examine any of your relationships?

9. Is the ending satisfying? Does Rowling tie up loose ends or does she leave some things unanswered?

(Questions by Katherine O'Connor of LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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The Cat's Table
Michael Ondaatje, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307744418


Summary
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin.

As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature.

The narrator’s elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself “with a distant eye” for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat’s Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.

As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy’s adult years, it tells a spellbinding story—by turns poignant and electrifying—about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 12, 1943
• Where—Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Education—B.A. University of Toronto (Canada);
   M.A., Queens University (Canada)
• Awards—Booker Prize, Books in Canada First
   Novel Award, Governor General's Award (twice),
   Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, Giller Prize, Prix
   Medicis, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Irish
   Times International Fiction Prize.
• Currently—lives in Toronto.

Philip Michael Ondaatj, OC, is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist and poet of Burgher origin (a Eurasian ethnic group historically from Sri Lanka). He is perhaps best known for his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, which was adapted into an Academy-Award-winning film.

Life and work
Michael Ondaatje was born in Colombo, (then Ceylon) in 1943 and moved to England in 1954. He attended Dulwich College (Alma Mater of literary luminaries such as P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler).

After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. He studied for a time at Bishop's College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto, where he received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. He then began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1970, he settled in Toronto and, from 1971 to 1990, taught English Literature there at York University and Glendon College.

Ondaatje's work includes fiction, autobiography, poetry and film. He has published thirteen books of poetry, and won the Governor General's Award for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) and There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1973-1978 (1979). Anil's Ghost was winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix Médicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Canada's Governor General's Award. The English Patient won of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Governor General's Award and later made into a motion picture, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. The English Patient could be considered a sequel to In the Skin of a Lion (1987). In the Skin of a Lion, a fictional story about early immigrant settlers in Toronto, won the 1988 City of Toronto Book Award, finalist for the 1987 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for best novel of the year in English, and winner of the first Canada Reads competition in 2002. Coming Through Slaughter, is a fictional story of New Orleans, Louisiana circa 1900 loosely based on the lives of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq. It was the winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award. Divisadero won the 2007 Governor General's Award. Running in the Family (1982) is a semi-fictional memoir of his Sri Lankan childhood.

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter and Divisadero have been adapted for the stage and produced in numerous theatrical productions across North America and Europe. Ondaatje's three films include a documentary on fellow poet B.P. Nichol, Sons of Captain Poetry, and The Clinton Special: A Film About The Farm Show, which chronicles a collaborative theatre experience led in 1971 by Paul Thompson of Theatre Passe Muraille. In 2002, Ondaatje published a non-fiction book, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, which won special recognition at the 2003 American Cinema Editors Awards, as well as a Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for best book of the year on the moving image.

Since the 1960s, Ondaatje has been involved with Toronto's Coach House Books, supporting the independent small press by working as a poetry editor. Ondaatje and his wife, novelist and academic Linda Spalding, co-edit Brick, A Literary Journal, with Michael Redhill, Michael Helm, and Esta Spalding. In 1988, Ondaatje was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) and two years later a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ondaatje has two children and is the brother of philanthropist, businessman and author Christopher Ondaatje. Ondaatje's nephew David is a film director and screenwriter who made the 2009 film The Lodger.  (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
[T]his lovely, shimmering book…is a tender meditation on how a child can be "smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future"…Mr. Ondaatje succeeds so well in capturing the anticipation and inquisitiveness of boyhood.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


In Ondaatje’s best novel since his Booker Prize winning The English Patient, an 11-year-old boy sets off on a voyage from Ceylon to London, where his mother awaits. Though Ondaatje tells us firmly in the “Author’s Note” that the story is “pure invention,” the young boy is also called Michael, was also born in Ceylon, and also grows up to become a writer. This air of the meta adds a gorgeous, modern twist to the timeless story of boys having an awfully big adventure: young Michael meets two children of a similar age on the Oronsay, Cassius and Ramadhin, and together the threesome gets up to all kinds of mischief on the ship, with, and at the expense of, an eccentric set of passengers. But it is Michael’s older, beguiling cousin, Emily, also onboard, who allows him glimpses of the man he is to become. As always, Ondaatje’s prose is lyrical, but here it is tempered; the result is clean and full of grace, such as in this description of the children having lashed themselves to the deck to experience a particularly violent storm: "our heads were stretched back to try to see how deep the bow would go on its next descent. Our screams unheard, even to each other, even to ourselves, even if the next day our throats were raw from yelling into that hallway of the sea."
Publishers Weekly


"The journey was to be an innocent story within the small parameter of my youth," says the narrator of his voyage aboard the Oronsay, which carried him through the Indian Ocean to England and his divorced mother. But for 11-year-old Michael, things shift from the moment he is seated at "the cat's table," the least propitious spot in the dining room. Michael enjoys wild escapades with the two other boys at the table, quiet Ramadhin and hell-raiser Cassius, while befriending the mismatched adults at his table as well as his card-playing roommate, who tends the ship's kennels. Others on board include Michael's older cousin Emily, who takes up with the magnetic head of a performing troupe while protecting a deaf and frail-looking girl named Asuntha, and a heavily chained prisoner. The relationship among these four characters precipitates crisis, but we're not led to it systematically; instead, Booker Prize winner Ondaatje (Anil's Ghost) flashes forward to Michael as an adult, showing us how unwittingly we lose our childhood innocence and how that loss comes to affect us much, much later. Verdict: Writing in a less lyrically wrought style than usual, Ondaatje turns in a quietly enthralling work. Highly recommended.  —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


This being a novel by the eminently accomplished Ondaatje, you may be certain that the tale will involve some tragedy, some heartache, and some miscommunication—and, yes, death. It is also beautifully detailed, without a false note: It is easy to imagine, in Ondaatje’s hands, being a passenger in the golden age of transoceanic voyaging, amid a sea of cocktail glasses and overflowing ashtrays, if in this case a setting more worthy of John le Carré than Noël Coward. Ondaatje writes with considerable tenderness of children who are all but abandoned, and at his best he lands squarely in Conrad territory, a place that smells of frankincense and in which "clotted clouds speckled the sky" and sandstorms blow out to sea from distant deserts—just the sort of place, in other words, that a reader wants to inhabit. Elegiac, mature and nostalgic—a fine evocation of childhood, and of days irretrievably past.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The epigraph below is taken from the short story “Youth” by Joseph Conrad. How does this set up the major themes of The Cat’s Table?

And this is how I see the East.... I see it always from a small boat—not a light, not a stir, not a sound. We conversed in low whispers, as if afraid to wake up the land.... It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea.

2. How is the voyage itself a metaphor for childhood?

3. Why do you think the opening passages of the book are told in third person?

4. We are 133 pages into the novel before Ondaatje gives us an idea of what year it is. How does he use time—or the sense of timelessness—to propel the story?

5. The anonymity of ocean travel and the sense that board ship we know only what others want us to know about them come into play at several points in the novel. What is Ondaatje saying about identity?

6. For several characters—the three boys and Emily among them—the journey represents a loss of innocence. For whom does it have the greatest impact?

7. Discuss the importance of some of the seemingly minor characters at the table: Mr. Mazappa, Mr. Fonseka, Mr. Nevil. What do they contribute to the story?

8. “What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power,” the narrator realizes (page 75). “Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.” How does this prove true over the course of the novel?

9. How do the narrator’s experiences breaking and entering with the Baron change his way of looking at the world?

10. Discuss the three boys’ experience during the typhoon. How does it affect their friendship and their attitude toward authority figures?

11. How does the death of Sir Hector factor into the larger story?

12. On page 155, the narrator refers to Ramadhin as “the saint of our clandestine family.” What does he mean?

13. When describing the collapse of his marriage, the narrator says,

Massi said that sometimes, when things overwhelmed me, there was a trick or a habit I had: I turned myself into something that did not belong anywhere. I trusted nothing I was told, not even what I witnessed (page 203).

What made him behave this way? How did it affect his marriage?

14. On page 208, the narrator tells us about a master class given by the filmmaker Luc Dardenne in which...

he spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they; we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves.

Why did Ondaatje give us this warning, so far into the novel? What is he telling us?

15. What was your reaction to the revelations about Miss Lasqueti?

16. How do you think her letter to Emily might have changed the events on board the Oronsay? Why didn’t she send it?

17. Miss Laqueti signs off her letter,  “‘Despair young and never look back,’ an Irishman said. And this is what I did” (page 231). What does she mean?

18. Discuss Emily’s relationship with Asuntha. Did she, as the narrator suggests on page 251, see herself in the deaf girl?

19. When Emily says to the narrator, “I don’t think you can love me into safety,” (page 250), to what is she referring? What is the danger, decades after the voyage?

20. The narrator wishes to protect Emily, Cassius has Asuntha, and Ramadhin has Heather Cave. “What happened that the three of us had a desire to protect others seemingly less secure than ourselves?” he asks on page 262. How would you answer that question?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Cataloochee 
Wayne Caldwell, 2007
Random House
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812973730


Summary
Against the breathtaking backdrop of Appalachia comes a rich, multilayered post-Civil War saga of three generations of families—their dreams, their downfalls, and their faith. Cataloochee is a slice of southern Americana told in the classic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

Nestled in the mountains of North Carolina sits Cataloochee. In a time when “where you was born was where God wanted you,” the Wrights and the Carters, both farming families, travel to the valley to escape the rapid growth of neighboring towns and to have a few hundred acres all to themselves. But progress eventually winds its way to Cataloochee, too, and year after year the population swells as more people come to the valley to stake their fortune.

Never one to pass on opportunity, Ezra Banks, an ambitious young man seeking some land of his own, arrives in Cataloochee in the 1880s. His first order of business is to marry a Carter girl, Hannah, the daughter of the valley’s largest landowner. From there Ezra’s brood grows, as do those of the Carters and the Wrights. With hard work and determination, the burgeouning community transforms wilderness into home, to be passed on through generations.

But the idyll is not to last, nor to be inherited: The government takes steps to relocate folks to make room for the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and tragedy will touch one of the clans in a single, unimaginable act. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—Asheville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina; M.A.,
   Appalachian State; University; Ph.D., Duke University
• Currently—lives near Asheville, North Carolina


Wayne Caldwell was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Appalachian State University, and Duke University. He has taught at North Carolina Central University and at Union College in Schenectady, New York.  

Caldwell began writing fiction in the late 1990s. He has published four short stories and a poem, and won two short story prizes. Cataloochee, his first novel, brings to life a community’s historic struggles and close kinships over a span of six decades. Full of humor, darkness, beauty, and wisdom, Cataloochee is a classic novel of place and family

Caldwell lives near Asheville with his wife, Mary. They have two sons. (Adapted from the publisher and from the University of North Carolina at Asheville, Ramsey Library Special Collections.)

Book Reviews
In these days of strip malls and clogged highways, you can appreciate the government’s decision [to form the Great Smoky Mountains National Park]. But thanks to Caldwell’s skillful evocation, you’ll also be touched by the sense of loss that the people of this valley feel.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution


Caldwell fully captures the sense of the people, the time and the place as he writes of a vanished community and way of life.
The Denver Post


A vast, old-fashioned Southern tale...Caldwell writes with lyricism, precision, a hint of the Gothic, and a sweet underlying humor that together make his long story crackle and move. He captures the physical look and the rich language of this breathtaking mountainous country, and puts before us vivid new versions of an American type—hard, stoic, at home in isolation, courageous, pious, and strong—that is still an essential component of how we see ourselves. Every moment of the story feels both generous and true.
Oprah Magazine


The first time Ezra Banks sees the promised land called Cataloochee is when he runs away at age 14 and joins the Confederate army. So begins first-time novelist Caldwell's rambling account of life in the western mountains of North Carolina from 1864 to 1928. Land-poor Ezra returns to Cataloochee in 1880, marries Hannah Carter of the land-rich Carter family, takes over some of her father's property and goes on to raise a family and acquire more land, making him one of the wealthiest men in Cataloochee. But cantankerous Ezra is mean as a snake when he's drunk (and only slightly less when sober), earning him the community's enmity. The diffuse narrative moseys from one folksy yarn to the next about the fates of various members of the Carter/Banks clan. Late in the novel, conflict arrives in the form of the government's appropriation of Cataloochee to make way for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Then, Ezra, 78 and as irascible as ever, is shot to death, and his eldest son, Zeb, is charged with his murder. The ensuing trial is as singular as Cataloochee itself. A meandering and diverting collection of tangential yarns, Caldwell's debut will find a spot on many readers' shelves near Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Set in the reclusive mountains of North Carolina, Caldwell's rootsy first novel follows the small triumphs and tragedies of three families from the Civil War to 1928, when the area was absorbed into the new Smoky Mountains National Park. Keeping track of four generations of Carters, Banks, and Wrights, with their bountiful legions of offspring, would be a chore if not for Caldwell's deft touch, indelibly detailing characters even if their particular branch of the family tree only rustles free to offer a momentary glimpse into the loves, lives, and deaths of these hardscrabble folk. That the central conflict of the novel—a patricide—does not arise until well near the end speaks to the strength of the rest of this sprawling saga, wherein moments of inspired tenderness abut moments of unspeakable vileness, where friend and foe alike are worked deep into the folds of kith and kin. Throughout, Caldwell's prose weathers the bountiful yet perilous land with the measured resolve of an old folk balladeer, without resorting to sentiment or stereotype. Greil Marcus coined the term "old, weird America" in reference to the sometimes eerie, always peculiar Appalachian songs recorded by Harry Smith; this, then, is a novel about the folk who lived out their songs in that older, weirder America.—Ian Chipman
Booklist


Though Wayne Caldwell didn’t start writing until he turned 50, the debut novelist is now working on the sequel to his historical novel Cataloochee, which enters on fearsome patriarch Ezra Banks and portrays 60 years of a real-life community that once existed in rural North Carolina. The book features incredibly true-to-life, well-drawn characters, the “kind of people,” that “the reader misses when the last page is turned." "I hope people get a sense that we have lost this place and enjoy my re-creation,” says the author. “I became interested in Cataloochee the first time I went there. It was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen. I wrote a short story about my grandfather, which won a prize, and that started me forward.” To boost the book’s authenticity, the author revisited the setting with a Cataloochee native. “My cousin Raymond Caldwell was born there and had vivid memories of living there,” he says. “We would go hiking, and he could point out the cedar tree that used to be in someone’s front yard.” Caldwell also collected family stories and country lore to spin into his narrative. “I spent a lot of time with older folks like my wife’s great-uncle and those informed the book greatly,” he says. The sequel will follow the diaspora of Cataloochee’s denizens as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park comes into being in the 1930s.
Kirkus Reviews

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

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

Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help get you started.

1. Wayne Caldwell has said that he admires William Faulkner and Mark Twain, two authors whose works are "deadly serious" yet still contain a "bunch of belly laughs. Caldwell goes on to say, "I see no reason for a novel to be grim for 300 pages." What episodes strike you as particularly funny. What does the inclusion of humor add to Cataloochee?

2. One of the central concerns of the work is the loss of Eden: how civilization intrudes into an idyllic, close-knit, isolated community. In what way does Cataloochee call into question the idea of progress? Are we to feel sadness for the loss of a uniquely American way of life? This story took place in the two previous centuries. Is there a corollary "loss of eden" taking place in the 21st century?

3. Talk about how the different generations in Cataloochee viewed the government's relocation project and creation of a national park? Is the benefit we might feel today for the park worth the sense of loss felt by residents 80 years ago?

3. In the very first chapter, Ezra hears a Baptist preacher read from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 12, wherein God says to the rich man who wishs to store up his wealth,

Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall these things be, which thou has provided? So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.

How does this message echo throughout the book, especially, as regards Ezra?

4. The characters in this book often invite others to "pull up a chair and set awhile." Some readers have suggested that the invitation is for us, as well—that Caldwell has the ability to pull readers into the lives of all the characters. Do you feel that way, and if so, how does Caldwell, as a writer, accomplish that? If you don't feel invited in, why not?

5. The book begins, in the prologue, with the sound of six shots, heralding the death of Ezra. What else do those shots herald, metaphoriclly speaking? Also, of course, discuss Jeb's trial and outcome.

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

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Catch-22 
Peter Heller, 1961
Simon & Schuster
540 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451626650


Summary
Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time. In recent years it has been named to “best novels” lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer.

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him.

But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

As revealing today as when it was first published, this brilliant novel expresses the concerns of an entire generation in its black comedy. World War II flier John Yossarian decides that his only mission each time he goes up is to return—alive! (From the publisher.)

More
Yossarian is a paranoid American bombardier stationed off the Italian coast during World War II who believes that everyone is out to kill him. Fearing he will be killed during a bombing run, Yossarian takes desperate measures to avoid flying, such as checking himself into a hospital with a fake liver condition and moving the bomb line on the map of Italy, which postpones the bombing mission to Bologna.

Author Bio
• Birth—May 1, 1923
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Died—December 12, 1999
• Where—East Hamton, New York
• Education—University of Southern California, New York University;
   M.A., Columbia University


Joseph Heller was an American satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. The title of one of his works, Catch-22, entered the English language to refer to a vicious circle wherein an absurd, no-win choice, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, a same negative outcome is a certainty.

Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain examples of modern satire.

Early years
Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents, Lena and Isaac Donald Heller, from Russia. Even as a child, he loved to write; as a teenager, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland and sent it to the New York Daily News, which rejected it. At least one scholar suggests that Heller knew that he wanted to become a writer, after recalling that he received a children's version of the Iliad when he was ten.

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to the Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. His unit was the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, 12th Air Force. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning.... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it."

On his return home he "felt like a hero.... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs."  ("Milk runs" were combat missions, but mostly uneventful due to a lack of intense opposition from enemy anti-aircraft artillery or fighters).

After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California and NYU on the G.I. Bill. In 1949, he received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Following his graduation, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St Catherine's College, Oxford (1949–50) and, after returning home, he taught composition at Pennsylvania State University for two years (1950–52). He also taught fiction and dramatic writing at Yale.

He then briefly worked for Time Inc., before taking a job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency where he worked alongside future novelist Mary Higgins Clark. He was first published in 1948, when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories. The story nearly won the "Atlantic First."

He was married to Shirley Held from 1945 to 1981. They had two children.

Catch-22
While sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of the lines

It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, [Yossarian] fell madly in love with him.

Within the next day, he began to envision the story that could result from this beginning, and invented the characters, the plot, and the tone that the story would eventually take. Within a week, he had finished the first chapter and sent it to his agent. He did not do any more writing for the next year, as he planned the rest of the story. The initial chapter was published in 1955 as "Catch-18" in Issue 7 of New World Writing.

Although he originally did not intend the story to be longer than a novelette, Heller was able to add enough substance to the plot that he felt it could become his first novel. When he was one-third done with the work, his agent whose assistant, Candida Donadio, liked it and sent it to publishers. Heller was not particularly attached to the work, and decided that he would not finish it if publishers were not interested. The work was soon purchased by Simon and Schuster, who gave him US $750 and promised him an additional $750 when the full manuscript was delivered. Heller missed his deadline by four to five years but, after eight years of thought, delivered the novel to his publisher.

The finished novel describes the wartime experiences of Army Air Corps Captain John Yossarian. Yossarian devises multiple strategies to avoid combat missions, but the military bureaucracy is always able to find a way to make him stay. As Heller observed,

Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts—and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?

Heller has also commented that "peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it."

Just before publication, the novel's title was changed to Catch-22 to avoid confusion with Leon Uris' new novel, Mila 18. The novel was published in hardback in 1961 to mixed reviews, with the Chicago Sun-Times calling it "the best American novel in years" while other critics derided it as "disorganized, unreadable, and crass." It sold only 30,000 copies in the US hardback in its first year of publication. Reaction was very different in the UK, where, within one week of its publication, the novel was number one on the bestseller lists.

Once it was released in paperback in October 1962, however, Catch-22 caught the imaginations of many baby boomers, who identified with the novel's anti-war sentiments. The book went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States. The novel's title became a buzzword for a dilemma with no easy way out. Now considered a classic, the book was listed at number 7 on Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the century.

The movie rights to the novel were purchased in 1962, and, combined with his royalties, made Heller a millionaire. The film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Bob Newhart, Paula Prentiss, and Orson Welles, was released in 1970.

Other works
Shortly after Catch-22 was published, Heller thought of an idea for his next novel, which would become Something Happened, but did not act on it for two years. In the meantime he focused on scripts, completing the final screenplay for the movie adaptation of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, as well as a television comedy script that eventually aired as part of McHale's Navy.

In 1969, Heller wrote a play called We Bombed in New Haven. It delivered an anti-war message while discussing the Vietnam War. It was originally produced by the Repertory Company of the Yale Drama School, with Stacy Keach in the starring role. After a slight revision, it was published by Alfred A. Knopf and then debuted on Broadway, starring Jason Robards.

Something Happened, was finally published in 1974. Critics were enthusiastic about the book, and both its hardcover and paperback editions reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Heller wrote another five novels, each of which took him several years to complete. One of them, Closing Time, revisited many of the characters from Catch-22 as they adjusted to post-war New York. All of the novels sold respectably well, but could not duplicate the success of his debut. Told by an interviewer that he had never produced anything else as good as Catch-22, Heller famously responded, "Who has?"

Heller maintained that he did not "have a philosophy of life, or a need to organize its progression. My books are not constructed to "say anything." Only when he was almost one-third finished with the novel would he gain a clear vision of what it should be about. At that point, with the idea solidified, he would rewrite all that he had finished and then continue to the end of the story. The finished version of the novel would often not begin or end with the sentences he had originally envisioned, although he usually tried to include the original opening sentence somewhere in the text.

Teaching
In the 1970s Heller taught creative writing at the City College of New York. After the publication of Catch-22, Heller resumed a part-time academic career as a teacher of creative writing at Yale University and at the University of Pennsylvania.

Illness
In December, 1981, Heller was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome, a debilitating syndrome that was to leave him temporarily paralyzed. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of Mount Sinai Medical Hospital for a month and was transferred in January (1982 to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. His illness and recovery are recounted at great length in the autobiographical No Laughing Matter, which contains alternating chapters by Heller and his good friend Speed Vogel. The book reveals the assistance and companionship Heller received from a number of his good friends—Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman and George Mandel among them.

Heller eventually made a substantial recovery. He later married Valerie Humphries, one of the nurses who helped him become well again.

Later years
In 1991 Heller returned to St. Catherine's at Oxford as a visiting Fellow for a term and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998, he released a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in which he relived his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered some details about the inspirations for Catch-22.

He died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, on Long Island, in December, 1999, shortly after the completion of his final novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. On hearing of Heller's death, his friend Kurt Vonnegut said, "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for American literature."

Catch-22 controversy
In April 1998, Lewis Pollock wrote to The Sunday Times regarding "the amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personnel injuries and incidents" in Catch-22 and The Sky is a Lonely Place (Face of a Hero in the U.S.), published in 1951 by Louis Falstein. Falstein's novel was available two years before Heller wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 (1953) while he was a student at Oxford. The Times stated:

Both have central characters who are using their wits to escape the aerial carnage; both are haunted by an omnipresent injured airman, invisible inside a white body cast.

Stating he had never read Falstein's novel, or heard of him, Heller said: "My book came out in 1961.... I find it funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself, who died just last year." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/4/2014.)

Book Reviews
Catch-22 is the only war novel I've ever read that makes any sense.
Harper Lee


One of the most bitterly funny works in the language.... Explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant.
New Republic


To my mind, there have been two great American novels in the past fifty years. Catch-22 is one.
Stephen King - Entertainment Weekly


Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II.... [T]his novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.
Nelson Algren - Nation


It’s the rock and roll of novels.... There’s no book like it.... Surprisingly powerful
Norman Mailer - Esquire


One of the greatest anti-war books ever written.
Vanity Fair

Discussion Questions
1. A complex, chaotic structure makes the novel difficult to follow. How might this structure parallel, represent, and/or elevate themes in the story? How does Heller piece together the chronology of events?

The Catcher in the Rye 
J.D. Salinger, 1951
Little, Brown & Co.
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316769488

Summary 
The Catcher in the Rye covers 48 hours in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who has just flunked out of his expensive boarding school in eastern Pennsylvania. This makes the fourth school from which he's been expelled from. Holden heads to New York City, his home, and puts himself up in the Edmont Hotel. Over the next two days, through a series of encounters, Holden experiences the cynicism and phoniness of adult life— his narrative voice capturing the essence of teenage angst and alienation. The novel begins:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them.

(From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—January 01, 1919
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Died—January 27, 2010
• Where—Cornish, New Hampshire
• Education—Valley Forge Military Academy; attended New
  York University, Ursinus College, Columbia University


Jerome David Salinger established his reputation on the basis of a single novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), whose principal character, Holden Caulfield, epitomized the growing pains of a generation of high school and college students. The public attention that followed the success of the book led Salinger to move from New York to the remote hills of Cornish, New Hampshire, where he lived until his death in 2010.

Before that he had published only a few short stories; one of them, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which appeared in The New Yorker in 1949, introduced readers to Seymour Glass, a character who subsequently figured in Franny and Zooey (1961) and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Salinger's only other published books. Of his 35 published short stories, those which Salinger wishes to preserve are collected in Nine Stories (1953). (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Mr. Salinger's rendering of teen-age speech is wonderful: the unconscious humor, the repetitions, the slang and profanity, the emphasis, all are just right. Holden's mercurial changes of mood, his stubborn refusal to admit his own sensitiveness and emotions, his cheerful disregard of what is sometimes known as reality are typically and heart breakingly adolescent. 

In New York Holden's nightmarish efforts to escape from himself by liquor, sex, night clubs, movies, sociability—anything and everything--are fruitless. Misadventure piles on misadventure, but he bears it all with a grim cheerfulness and stubborn courage. He is finally saved as a result of his meeting with his little sister Phoebe, like Holden a wonderful creation. She is the single person who supplies and just in time—the affection that Holden needs.
   
Certainly you'll look a long time before you'll meet another youngster like Holden Caulfield, as likable and, in spite of his failings, as sound. And though he's still not out of the woods entirely, there at the end, still we think he's going to turn out all right.
Nash K. Burger - New York Times

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 get your discussion started for The Catcher in the Rye:

1. Discuss Holden's observations about the carousel's gold ring at the end of the novel. What is the significance of the ring? What do his observations reveal about his state of maturity? In what way has his character changed—or developed—by the end of the story? (See LitCourse 5 on characterization.)

2. Do Holden's encounters with adult hypocrisy ring true to you? Or are they more a reflection of his own deteriorating mental stability? Or both?

3. Holden seems to be reaching out for genuine intimacy in his encounters. Is he himself capable of intimacy? Are any of the other characters capable of providing it? In fact, what is intimacy—sexual and/or non-sexual?

4. What role does Phoebe play in the novel?

5. What is the significance of the title—especially the fact that Holden gets Robert Burns's poem wrong?

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

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Catching Air 
Sarah Pekkanen, 2014
Simon & Schuster
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451673531


Summary
Two married couples pursue a dream to open a bed-and-breakfast in small-town Vermont.

A chance to run a B&B in snowy, remote Vermont—it’s an offer Kira Danner can’t resist after six soul-crushing years of working as a lawyer in Florida. As Kira and her husband, Peter, step into a brand new life, she quells her fears about living with the B&B’s co-owners: Peter’s sexy, irresponsible brother Rand, and Rand’s wife, Alyssa...who is essentially a stranger.

For her part, Alyssa sees taking over the B&B as the latest in a string of adventures. Plus, a quiet place might help her recover from the news that she can’t bear children. But the idyllic town proves to be anything but serene: Within weeks, the sisters-in-law are scrambling to prepare for their first big booking—a winter wedding—and soon a shy, mysterious woman comes to work for them.

Dawn Zukoski is hiding something; that much is clear. But what the sisters-in-law don't realize is that Dawn is also hiding from someone…

Relatable and dynamic, Catching Air delves deeply into the vital relationships that give shape to women’s lives. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1967
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Raised—Bethesda, Maryland
• Education—University of Wisconsin; University of Maryland
• Currently—lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland


Sarah Pekkanen was born in New York City, arriving so quickly that doctors had no time to give her mother painkillers. This was the last time Sarah ever arrived for anything earlier than expected. Her mother still harbors a slight grudge.

Sarah’s family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, where Sarah, along with a co-author, wrote a book entitled “Miscellaneous Tales and Poems.” Shockingly, publishers did not leap upon this literary masterpiece. Sarah sent a sternly-worded letter to publishers asking them to respond to her manuscript. Sarah no longer favors Raggedy Ann stationery, although she is sure it impressed top New York publishers.

Sarah’s parents were hauled into her elementary school to see first-hand the shocking condition of her desk. Sarah’s parents stared, open-mouthed, at the crumpled pieces of paper, broken pencils, and old notebooks crowding Sarah’s desk. Sarah’s organization skills have since improved. Slightly.

After college, Sarah began work as a journalist, covering Capitol Hill. Unfortunately, Sarah could not understand the thick drawls of the U.S. Senators from Alabama, resulting in many unintentional misquotes. Sarah was groped by one octogenarian politician, sumo-bumped off a subway car by Ted Kennedy, and unsuccessfully sued by the chief of staff to a corrupt U.S. Congresswoman. Sarah also worked briefly as an on-air correspondent for e! Entertainment Network, until the e! producers realized that Capitol Hill wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, what one might call sexy.

Sarah married Glenn Reynolds, completing her rebellion against her father, who told her never to become a writer or marry a lawyer.

Sarah took a job at Gannett New Service/USAToday, covering Capitol Hill. Sarah was assigned to cover the White House Correspondents Dinner and rode in the Presidential motorcade to the dinner. Sarah convinced a White House aide to let her stick her head out of the limousine moon-roof during the ride and wave to onlookers. Later, her triumph was tempered by the fact that bouncers would not allow her into the Vanity Fair after-party. Sarah attempted entry three times in case the bouncers were just kidding.

Sarah took a job writing features for the Baltimore Sun, and interviewed the actor who played Greg Brady. She refrained from asking if he really made out with Marcia, but just barely.

Sarah and Glenn’s son Jackson was born. He arrived too quickly for Sarah to receive painkillers, and Sarah was pretty sure she saw her mother smirking. When Glenn put a loving hand on Sarah’s shoulder during the throes of labor, Sarah decided the most expedient way to get Glenn to remove his hand was to bite it, hard. She was proved right.

Twenty months later, Sarah and Glenn’s son Will was born. Three weeks later, Sarah and Glenn moved into a new home and renovated the kitchen. Two weeks later, Glenn caught pneumonia and simultaneously started a new job. Ten days after the kitchen renovation was complete, the kitchen caught on fire, and Sarah, Glenn and family moved to a hotel while renovation began anew. Sarah and Glenn decided to work on their "timing" issues.

Having left her journalism job to chase around the ever-active Jack and Will, Sarah started writing a column for Bethesda Magazine and began work on a novel. She did not write it on Raggedy Ann stationery.

Her first book, The Opposite of Me, came out in 2010 and her second, Skiping, a Beat in 2011. Those were followed by These Girls in 2012, The Best of Me in 2013, and Catching Air in 2014.

Sarah gave birth to a bouncing baby boy, Dylan, and  gets a little weepy every time she contemplates her good luck. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Ultimately, Pekkanen shows that relationships of any kind take work, expression of love, and the willingness to take risks in order to save them.
New York Journal of Books


Pekkanen weaves a satisfying tale of the nuances of marriage and duty and how small kindnesses can reestablish the bonds of family after an estrangement.
People


Smart and soulful, Pekkanen explores the place where self and sisterhood intersect.
Redbook


When Kira and her husband, Peter, decide to join his brother, Rand, and his wife, Alyssa, in Vermont to help run their new bed-and-breakfast, it’s a big departure from their previously planned-out lives.... Pekkanen writes novels that offer thoughtful examinations of how the past shapes adult relationships and of the differences between men and women. Many of the interwoven story lines are finely wrought, and the book as a whole is compelling. —Aleksandra Walker
Booklist


The author explores issues that couples and friends face today—nothing and nobody is perfect, and life has hardships that must be endured. Verdict: Once again, Pekkanen delivers relatable characters and story lines, showcasing the strength and perseverance required to make relationships work. [A]n entertaining and emotional read. —Erin Holt, Williamson Cty. P.L., Franklin, TN
Library Journal


Pekkanen...returns to comfortable terrain by focusing on two couples running a Vermont bed-and-breakfast.... Although this novel shares some of the same qualities as Pekkanen's other successes, Dawn's subplot feels like a strained jolt of danger into an otherwise cohesive, if thinly plotted, family drama. A likable, if lesser, effort from Pekkanen.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In what ways do Alyssa and Kira discover that they are more alike than they believed they were?

2. How are Rand and Peter contrasted throughout the novel? What are their different approaches to running the bed-and- breakfast?

3. For Dawn, following her heart rather than her head leads her into a disastrous outcome. Have you ever found yourself in a difficult situation because you were blinded by love?

4. Alyssa recalls a friend who went from weighing 350 pounds to running several marathons a year: "She hadn’t changed her habits; her habits had changed her." What’s the meaning behind this distinction? What are some of the new habits that these characters develop because they are running the B-and-B?

5. Even though Kira, Dawn, and Alyssa are all grown women, how are their childhood experiences—particularly, the degree to which they felt safe and cared for—impacting them throughout the novel? Particularly for Kira and Alyssa, how are these experiences shaping how they think about becoming mothers themselves?

6. In thinking about her marriage to Rand, Alyssa notes, "Their relationship had never been truly tested." Given that they regularly moved and traveled—and likely faced financial uncertainty as a result—did this analysis surprise you? What kinds of life events do you think really test a romantic relationship?

7. How do each woman’s memories of her mother drive her forward, or inspire her?

8. Kira becomes frustrated when she feels she’s bearing the weight of planning the wedding and the daily management of the inn without Peter equally contributing; Alyssa starts to panic when she realizes that perhaps she never really ensured that Rand also wanted a child as much as she did. To what degree is each woman responsible for the situations they find themselves in, and to what extent should they expect their husbands to behave differently?

9. Alyssa says that she was worried she’d "feel confined by bed rest" but that surprisingly, "all her traveling was what had prepared her for it." What are some other seemingly polar opposite experiences that end up being mutually beneficial?

10. Consider where we leave Rand at the novel’s conclusion. What do you think will happen to his and Alyssa’s marriage? Do you think men are less likely than women to change their patterns of behavior?

11. Kira disappears from the B-and-B and confronts two men when she arrives in Florida. What kind of power has each man held over her sense of self since she and Peter moved to Vermont, and why is it essential for her to find closure with each of them?

12. Consider the different types of relationships that are depicted in the novel—romantic bonds, blood relations, in-laws, and friends—and discuss the expectations and "norms" associated with each.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Catching Rain 
Sharon Duerst, 2014
White Spring
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780985537821


Summary
Mia Casinelli is captivated by Mexico - a life long-lost and a mysterious woman in her dreams. She sees a future in the smile of a stranger there, but what to do about Gerald back in Oregon?

How can she build a new life with only words and inklings to lead the way?

This book is the sequel to Mending Stones (2012).

Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—the state of Idaho, USA
• Raised—the state of Oregon
• Education—B.S., University of Oregon
• Currently—lives in Bend, Oregon


When not writing or walking or tackling creative challenges, Sharon Duerst enjoys family and friends and many opportunities to appreciate the beauty of nature. After growing up in Idaho and the Columbia River Gorge, Sharon finished college in the Willamette Valley, and started her career in education and long-term care on the Oregon Coast. Now living on the high desert of Central Oregon, with wide spaces of time and landscape to explore, she finds great inspiration in natural environments. (From the author.)

Visit the author's website.

Book Reviews
The following reviews were posted on Goodreads.

I had my coffee and started reading, ate lunch while reading and didn’t stop until reaching the beautiful ending! I laughed…I cried…I rejoiced in how Mia changed her life! I loved this story! It reminded me how important it is to take risks in life and move toward what is wanted— even if not knowing at all where it will lead. Following intuition can be life altering! I feel the characters are friends, and I wonder what is next in their lives! I don’t want to let them go! — Jet McCann

I loved the depth of the story, and the characters! I couldn’t put it down until I finished reading! It was so good! Nothing left out! I loved the ending!! I’m amazed at the places the story went. I want to look up the attractions at the back of the book and plan a Catching Rain Itinerary! — Karen Martell

I could not put this book down! So easy to read…Really flowed. Great story line…Loved reading about the different locations. — Katrena Meyer

“A great book! The poetry is fascinating. I love the travel, and especially being able to relate to all the places in the Pacific Northwest. I also love a great love story, and I needed tissue at the end! — Connie Van Sickle

Catching Rain picks up where Mending Stone left off, tied up loose ends with enough tragedy and heartache, but ends beautifully—exactly where you would want it to! — Debbie Wiemeyer

Love the story—the mystery unfolding about who Mia is…Love the focus on intuition, and attention to dreams and images…Love the relationships…Love the locations…many of my favorite places…the Northwest…San Francisco…Mexico…What a lovely story! I loved reading this book! — Maria Carlos

Discussion Questions
1.  What part does intuition play in the plot?

2.  Do you see growth in Mia?

3.  How does the environment in Mexico influence Mia?

4.  What do you find surprising or shocking?

5.  Do you think Mia will continue writing? Or was it only part of her processing—a necessary step in her evolving thoughts and healing?

6.  Did you enjoy the travel features?

7.  What is your favorite part of the story?

8.  Who do you think is the wisest character?

9.  Who is your favorite character? Why?

10. Do you believe in fate? Divine intervention? Prayer?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)

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Catering to Nobody (Goldy Culinary Mystery series #1)
Diane Mott Davidson, 1992
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553584707


Summary
Catering a wake is not Goldy Schulz’s idea of fun. Yet the Colorado caterer throws herself into preparing a savory feast including Poached Salmon and Strawberry Shortcake Buffet designed to soothe forty mourners. And her culinary efforts seem to be exactly what the doctor ordered...until her ex-father-in-law gynecologist Fritz Korman is struck down and Goldy is accused of adding poison to the menu.

Now, with the Department of Health impounding her leftovers, her ex-husband proclaiming her guilt, and her business about to be shut down, Goldy knows she can’t wait for the police to serve up the answers. She’ll soon uncover more than one family skeleton and a veritable stew of unpalatable secrets—the kind that could make Goldy the main course in an unsavory killer’s next murder! (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 22, 1949
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.A. Johns Hopkins
• Awards—Anthony Award from Bouchercon (World Mystery
   Convention)
• Currently—Evergreen, Colorado


Diane Mott Davidson is an American author of mystery novels that use the theme of food. Several recipes are included in each book, and each novel title is a play on a food or drink word.

Mott Davidson studied political science at Wellesley College and lived across the hall from Hillary Clinton. In a few of her novels (particularly, The Cereal Murders), she references a prestigious eastern women's college that her sleuth, Goldy Schulz, attended before transferring to a Colorado state university. In real life, Mott Davidson transferred from Wellesley and eventually graduated from Stanford University.

The main character in Mott Davidson's novels is Goldy Schulz, a small town caterer who also solves murder mysteries in her spare time. At the start of the series, Goldy is a recently divorced mother with a young son trying to make a living as a caterer in the fictional town of Aspen Meadows, CO. As the series progresses, new characters are introduced that change Goldy's professional and personal life. It has been noted that Aspen Meadows closely resembles a real Colorado town, Evergreen. Evergreen is where Mott Davidson currently resides with her family.

The series has now reached 15 books, with Fataly Flakey (2009) as the most recent. The first 12 books interwove recipes with the novel's text. When a dish is first described in the novel, the relevant recipe followed within the next few pages. Double Shot, the 12th novel, marked a change in the publishing of these recipes. In that book all recipes are compiled and printed at the end of the novel.

She was the guest of honor at the 2007 Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave in Manhattan, Kansas. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews 
Chef Goldy Schulz's life is a medley of murder, mayhem, and melted chocolate.
New York Post

Diane Mott Davidson's culinary mysteries can be hazardous to your waistline.
People

Davidson's debut is as embarrassing as a fallen souffle would be to her narrator, divorced culinary artist Goldy Korman of Goldilocks' Catering in Aspen Meadows, Colo. Goldy, in business to support herself and her 11-year-old son, Arch, caters the gathering after the funeral of Arch's teacher, at which her former father-in-law, gynecologist Fritz Korman, drinks from a poisoned cup. While the police make sure that Goldy is now "catering to nobody," she begins her own investigation to clear herself. As amorous detective Tom Schulz courts her, Goldy courts danger, seeking connections among the recovered Fritz, the teacher and nearly everyone else in the rustic town, including her teenage lodger, Patty Sue. The only rewards of the mystery are recipes for tasty dishes and the endearing Arch, who outwits the killer and is the sole credible character in the overstuffed cast.
Publishers Weekly

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 Catering to Nobody:

1. Talk about Goldy as a character. How would you describe her? Some readers find her strong or spunky, others see her as whiny and unlikable? What do you think of her as the book's heroine?

2. What do you make of the other characters? There's John Richard, "The Jerk"—Goldy's ex-husband. Is his abusive behavior and his string of affairs handled realistically? And what about Marla—what does she bring to the party?

3. What is the reason that Goldy initiates her own investigation into the attempted poisoning of her ex-father-in-law, Fritz Korman?

4. What does Goldy learn about Fritz...why do people seem to have grudges against him?

5. How does Goldy's son Arch cope with the death of his favorite teacher, Laura Smiley? Are his coping mechanisms typical of young people who experience the death of someone close? Did you find it odd that Goldy doesn't demand more from the school regarding Arch's black eyes?

6. Laura supposedly committed suicide, but when Goldy begins to examine Laura's life...she suspects something else was at play? What, in particular, prompts Goldy to doubt the official cause of death?

7. Talk about the red herrings—the techniques the author uses to lead readers astray, causing us to wrongly suspect various neighbors in Aspen Meadows? Were you taken in by the false clues?

8. What about the real clues? Does Davidson disguise them well enough? In other words, were you surprised—or were you able to figure out who the culprit was early on?

9. Does this book deliver...as a mystery? Did it hold your interest, did you find yourself quickly turning pages to learn what happened next? Were you satisfied, or surprised, by the ending? Was the writing fresh? Or did you find the writing cliched...and the ending predictable?

10. If you've read others in the Goldy series, how does this one stack up to the others? If this is the first Goldy book you've read, are you inspired to read more?

11. Talk about the recipes—have you tried them? Are you serving them at your book club meeting? Why does Davidson include them as part of her novel? What part do they play in the plot? Is there a symbolic significance to the use of recipes, the fact that an entire series is based around a catering business? Or are they just for fun?!

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

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Catherine House 
Elisabeth Thomas, 2020
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062905659 


Summary
A gothic-infused debut of literary suspense, set within a secluded, elite university and following a dangerously curious, rebellious undergraduate who uncovers a shocking secret about an exclusive circle of students … and the dark truth beneath her school’s promise of prestige.

Trust us, you belong here.

Catherine House is a school of higher learning like no other. Hidden deep in the woods of rural Pennsylvania, this crucible of reformist liberal arts study with its experimental curriculum, wildly selective admissions policy, and formidable endowment, has produced some of the world’s best minds: prize-winning authors, artists, inventors, Supreme Court justices, presidents.

For those lucky few selected, tuition, room, and board are free. But acceptance comes with a price.

Students are required to give the House three years—summers included—completely removed from the outside world. Family, friends, television, music, even their clothing must be left behind. In return, the school promises a future of sublime power and prestige, and that its graduates can become anything or anyone they desire.

Among this year’s incoming class is Ines Murillo, who expects to trade blurry nights of parties, cruel friends, and dangerous men for rigorous intellectual discipline—only to discover an environment of sanctioned revelry. Even the school’s enigmatic director, Viktoria, encourages the students to explore, to expand their minds, to find themselves within the formidable iron gates of Catherine.

For Ines, it is the closest thing to a home she’s ever had. But the House’s strange protocols soon make this refuge, with its worn velvet and weathered leather, feel increasingly like a gilded prison.

And when tragedy strikes, Ines begins to suspect that the school—in all its shabby splendor, hallowed history, advanced theories, and controlled decadence—might be hiding a dangerous agenda within the secretive, tightly knit group of students selected to study its most promising and mysterious curriculum.

Combining the haunting sophistication and dusky, atmospheric style of Sarah Waters with the unsettling isolation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Catherine House is a devious, deliciously steamy, and suspenseful page-turner with shocking twists and sharp edges that is sure to leave readers breathless. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Elisabeth Thomas grew up in the borough of Brooklyn, New York, where she still lives and now writes. She graduated from Yale University and currently works as an archivist for a modern art museum. Catherine House is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A] delicious literary Gothic debut, Ines Murillo, a self-described ghost, is accepted into the mysterious, exclusive Catherine House, …so exclusive, and so romantic, that Ines just might be able to stop running from her dark past. When Ines discovers the truth about Catherine House, she must grapple with what she has long avoided: who she is and who she might become.
New York Times Book Review


At times, the narrative stretches a bit thin, repeating certain motifs as the characters roam the halls, entering one mysterious room after another. But the novel compensates for redundancy with some wonderfully horrific and truly shocking discoveries within these locked antechambers. There are shades of Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock as suspense builds in the winding corridors of the house and the twisting turns of the psyche. Moody and evocative as a fever dream, Catherine House is the sort of book that wraps itself around your brain, drawing you closer with each hypnotic step.
Washington Post


The strength of this debut novel relies on its refusal to adhere to any sort of genre conventions . . .  The book’s setting provides just as much fodder for thought and discussion as do its characters or plot. . . . While the book is easy to read—Thomas’s smart prose ensures that—the echoes of discomfort linger long after the last pages are turned.
Boston Globe


Thomas’s debut novel is a dark, delicious gothic read that hits all the right spots in the best way. If you want a book you can’t put down for even a second, this is it (10 Most Anticipated Books Of 2020).
Forbes


Elisabeth Thomas’s debut novel weaves a thrilling, compact story that builds dread slowly. . . . Thomas incorporates elements of science fiction as she begins to reveal the darkness at work on campus, but not before readers are eased in with some classic hallmarks of prep-school fiction.
Atlantic


Calling all The Secret History fans! This debut novel is set within the walls of an exclusive private college, but with a twist: Students seclude themselves for three years, completely removed from their previous lives.
Entertainment Weekly


[S]pellbinding…. Surreal imagery, spare characterization, and artful, hypnotic prose lend Thomas’s tale a delirious air, but at the book’s core lies a profound portrait of depression and adolescent turmoil. Fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History will devour this philosophical fever dream.
Publishers Weekly


[T]the tone of the story is dark and discomforting.…  Readers looking for a strong atmospheric setting in the gothic style will be drawn in by this psychological thriller. Less satisfying are the interesting if underdeveloped characters. —Stacey Hayman, Rocky River P.L., OH
Library Journal


(Starred review) For fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Catherine House is a haunting, atmospheric reflection on the discovery of self and others. At times terrifying, always gorgeously captivating, Thomas’ debut is one not to be missed, and perhaps to be revisited frequently.
Booklist


[T]he reader only learns as much as Ines herself can see and process. In the end, we're shut out of the mysteries of Catherine House, too. A promising but uneven debut that walks the line between speculative fiction and ghost story.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for CATHERINE HOUSE … then take off on your own:

1. What do you think of Ines Murillo when we first meet her, primarily during the first third of the book? Ines views Catherine House with a certain disdain. Why? And why is she there?

2. (Follow-up to Question 1) What is the past Ines is running from? How has that past shaped her? Does Ines change by the novel's end?

3. Institutions are not always what they seem. What were your first impressions of Catherine House—meant to be an exclusive school that has graduated some of the best and the brightest minds in the arts, sciences, and politics? When does your perspective begin to shift: at what point did you begin to suspect that the school is something other than what it claims to be?

4. How does Ines view the school—along with its demand that students are to give it their all. What does she observe about Catherine House that makes her skeptical?

5 Describe the strange rituals and traditions at Catherine House? Are they cult-like, benign, or something else? Why does the school choose the particular students it does? What do they want out of their students?

6. In the latter half of the book, we learn that the school is engaged in research into a substance called "plasma." What is plasma? The novel is rather vague about plasma, but discuss its nature and its effects as best you can? How would you describe Ines's first encounter with plasma?

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

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Caught 
Harlan Coben, 2010
Penguin Group USA
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451232700


Summary
From the #1 New York Times bestselling master of suspense comes a fast-paced, emotion-packed novel about guilt, grief, and our capacity to forgive.

Seventeen-year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, captain of the lacrosse team, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her. Which is why, when her mother wakes one morning to find that Haley never came home the night before, and three months quickly pass without word from the girl, the community assumes the worst.

Wendy Tynes is a reporter on a mission, to identify and bring down sexual predators via elaborate-and nationally televised-sting operations. Working with local police on her news program Caught in the Act, Wendy and her team have publicly shamed dozens of men by the time she encounters her latest target.

Dan Mercer is a social worker known as a friend to troubled teens, but his story soon becomes more complicated than Wendy could have imagined.

In a novel that challenges as much as it thrills, filled with the astonishing tension and unseen suburban machinations that have become Coben's trademark, Caught tells the story of a missing girl, the community stunned by her loss, the predator who may have taken her, and the reporter who suddenly realizes she can't trust her own instincts about this story—or the motives of the people around her. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 4, 1962
• Raised—Livingston, New Jersey, USA
• Education—Amherst College
• Awards—Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Awards
• Currently—lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey

Harlan Coben is an American author of mystery novels and thrillers. The plots of his novels often involve the resurfacing of unresolved or misinterpreted events in the past (such as murders, fatal accidents, etc.) and often have multiple plot twists. Both series of Coben's books are set in and around New York and New Jersey, and some of the supporting characters in the two series have appeared in both.

Coben was born to a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, but was raised and schooled in Livingston, New Jersey with childhood friend and future politician Chris Christie at Livingston High School. While studying political science at Amherst College, he was a member of Psi Upsilon fraternity with author Dan Brown. After Amherst, Coben worked in the travel industry, in a company owned by his grandfather. He now lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey with his wife, Anne Armstrong-Coben MD, a pediatrician, and their four children.

Career
Coben was in his senior year at college when he realized he wanted to write. His first book was accepted when he was twenty-six but after publishing two stand-alone thrillers in his twenties (Play Dead in 1990 and Miracle Cure in 1991) he decided on a change of direction and began a series of thrillers featuring his character Myron Bolitar. The novels of the popular series follow the tales of a former basketball player turned sports agent (Bolitar), who often finds himself investigating murders involving his clients.

Coben has won an Edgar Award, a Shamus Award a Smelly Award (for writing about New Jersey) and an Anthony Award, and is the first writer to have received all three. He is also the first writer in more than a decade to be invited to write fiction for the New York Times op-ed page. He wrote a short story entitled "The Key to my Father," which appeared June 15, 2003.

In 2001 he released his first stand-alone thriller since the creation of the Myron Bolitar series in 1995, Tell No One, which went on to be his best selling novel to date. Film director Guillaume Canet made the book into a French thriller, Ne le dis à personne in 2006. Coben followed Tell No One with six more stand-alone novels. His 2008 novel Hold Tight became his first book to debut at No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list. Although this is another stand-alone novel, Coben commented on his official website that certain key characters from The Woods will make brief appearances. His 2009 novel, Long Lost, featured a return of Myron Bolitar and also debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller List. Caught, also a stand-alone thriller was published in 2010. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Early in Caught, Harlan Coben’s crazily hyperactive new thriller, a wholesome teenage girl named Haley McWaid disappears from her happy New Jersey home.... Mr. Coben has the edge when it comes to popcorn pacing. His once-enveloping stories now move at a breakneck clip not unlike James Patterson’s, though at least Mr. Coben still writes chapters longer than three pages. Since anything and everything can happen in the berserk world of Caught, none of the suspense carries much weight, and no character has time to become particularly sympathetic.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


It may already be too late for this review to be written. I finished "Caught," the new thriller by that galloping bestseller-machine Harlan Coben, only 24 hours before sitting down at my computer, but already some details of its intricate plot are eluding my grasp. No doubt that's mostly my fault, but it may also have something to do with the brain-taxing plethora of secrets held and coverups performed by inhabitants of the New Jersey town where the action takes place.
Dennis Drabelle - Washington Post


It is possible for a life to go so badly wrong that it can never be right again?... The opening chapter of this excellent thriller is a salutary warning of how fragile civilised life can seem.... Coben resolves all this with twists and turns of plot that he has carefully prepared, but in the end what we take away from this book is less his ingenuity than his wisdom.
Roz Kaveney - Independent (UK)


Bestseller Coben (Hold Tight) has a knack for taking everyday nightmares and playing with life’s endless “what ifs,” as shown in this stand-alone thriller, a tightly choreographed dance of guilt and innocence, forgiveness and retribution. Frank Tremont, a world-weary, near-retirement investigator for New Jersey’s Essex County, has to face his failure to solve his last case—the disappearance of a teenage girl. Meanwhile, Dan Mercer stands accused of being a sexual predator thanks to the ambush journalism of Wendy Tynes, a tabloid TV reporter, who must cope with her husband’s death caused by a drunken driver as well as reckon with the possibility of Mercer’s innocence. When Tynes finds a link between a father of one of Mercer’s alleged victims and others felled by scandal, she could become a killer’s next victim. If the wealth of characters dilutes the suspense, Coben gives readers lots to think about when judging rights and wrongs.
Publishers Weekly


Teenager Haley McWaid doesn't come home one night, and when months go by without a word her parents assume the worst. Reporter Wendy Tynes conducts a sexual predator sting, working with the local police to capture men on camera and later televising the footage. Her latest suspect is community social worker Dan Mercer, and those who know him can't believe he's guilty. Tynes begins to question her instincts, but she carries on with her investigation, which reveals a shocking link between Mercer and the missing Haley, with aftershocks that will destroy a community. Verdict: Coben is in top form exposing the dark underside of modern suburbia. The story will chill readers, especially parents of teenagers. Complex and intricate, this is his best book since Promise Me. Don't escape, get Caught.
Library Journal


Along with his Myron Bolitar series, Coben's stand-alone novels have cemented his reputation as a solid writer and a relentless plotter of high-octane entertainment.... With his latest effort—though, admittedly, a generally slower-paced effort with weaker characterization than in other novels—Coben delivers solid entertainment. Again.
Booklist

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 Caught:

1. Is Harlan Coben able to juggle all the balls he's thrown into the air in this novel? Some critics have suggested there are there simply too many characters and mysteries to keep track of...or to cohere into a taut thriller. Do you agree or disagree? Were you able to follow all the twists and turns and stay on top of the storyline?

2. Talk about the way in which Coben juxtaposes ordinary, cozy domestic details with forces of evil in the larger society. Why? What might be his purpose as an author in using this narrative technique (which he does in many of his thrillers)?

3. Of the main characters, whom do you find most sympathetic—and why? Is it Wendy Tynes, Dan Mercer, Marcia McWaid...or others?

4. What do you think about Wendy's tactics of entrapment? Is she complicit in what happens to Dan—even if what happens is for a good cause?

5. What kind of pressures does Wendy, as a female, face at the TV station? How did you feel when she was fired from her job?

6. Talk about Wendy's coming to terms with the woman driver who killed her husband? What does she come to understand?

7. The book examines the role of TV, the Internet, and social media in creating public perception. What does the book suggest is the impact of all this high-speed communication on our lives, our identities, or the truth?

8. Of all the various plot strands and mysteries—a pedophile, an embezzling scheme, a college boys’ conspiracy, a missing girl, and a dead hooker—which was most intriguing or compelling? Were you ahead of the curve in figuring out how they all came together?

9. What about Jenna and her husband? What other course of action could they/should they have taken? What would have been the consequences?

10. Does this novel deliver? Does it offer a suspenseful plot and engaging characters? Was the ending a surprise...or predictable? Were all the loose ends tied up satisfactorily? Have you read other Coben books...if so, how does this one compare?

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

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Celestial Bodies 
Jokha Alharthi (Trans., Marilyn Booth), 2019 (U.S.)
Catapult Books
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781948226943


Summary
Winner, 2019 Man Booker International Prize

In the village of al-Awafi in Oman, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and await a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada.

These three women and their families, their losses and loves, unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-owning society into its complex present.

Through the sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth.

The first novel originally written in Arabic to ever win the Man Booker International Prize, and the first book by a female Omani author to be translated into English, Celestial Bodies marks the arrival in the United States of a major international writer. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 1978
• Where—Oman
• Education—Ph.D., University of Edinburgh
• Awards—Man Booker Prize
• Currently—lives in Al Khoudh, Oman


Jokha Alharthi, an Omani writer and academic, is the 2019 recipient of the Man Booker International Prize for her novel, Celestial Bodies.

Alharthi was born and educated primarily in Oman. She traveled to the U.K. where she earned her doctorate in classical Arabic literature from Edinburgh University. Currently, she is an associate professor in the Arabic department at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.

Alharthi has published three collections of short stories, three children's books, and three novels: Manamat, Sayyidat el-Qamar (Celestial Bodies), and Narinjah (Bitter Orange). She has also authored academic works.

The novel, Sayyidat el-Qamar, translated into English by Marilyn Booth and retitled Celestial Bodies, was published in the UK in 2018 and the US in 2019. The novel was the first work by an Arabic-language writer to be awarded the Man Booker International Prize (2019), and the first novel by an Omani woman to appear in English translation. 

In addition to English, Sayyidat el-Qamar (Celestial Bodies) has been translated into the following 20 languages: Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Malayalam, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese (also, Brazilian Portuguese), Romanian, Russian, Sinhalese, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/10/20.)

Book Reviews
[A]n innovative reimagining of the family saga. Alharthi avoids the languid ease of chronology in favor of dozens of taut character studies, often no more than a page or two…. These vignettes are sharp-eyed, sharp-edged and carefully deployed in a multigenerational jigsaw that’s as evasive as it is evocative…. [T]his is a contemporary novel, insistent and alive… a treasure house.
Beejay Silcox - New York Times Book Review


The glimpses into a culture relatively little known in the West are fascinating.
Jane Housham - Guardian (UK)


A book to win over the head and the heart in equal measure . . . Its delicate artistry draws us into a richly imagined community — opening out to tackle profound questions of time and mortality and disturbing aspects of our shared history.… Celestial Bodies evokes the forces that constrain us and those that set us free.
Bettany Hughes, chair - 2019 Man Booker International Prize


The form’s remarkable adaptability is on brilliant display…. Celestial Bodies tells the subtle and quietly anguished story of several unhappy marriages.… Yet one of the book’s signal triumphs is that Alharthi has constructed her own novelistic form…. The novel moves back and forth between the generations very flexibly, often in the course of a single page or even paragraph, owing to Alharthi’s deft management of time shifts.… The leaps and swerves seem closer to poetry or fable or song than to the novel… at once intimate and historical.
James Wood - New Yorker


[B]reathtaking… Celestial Bodies… follows the lives of three sisters from a small village at a time of rapid social and economic change in Oman. The tale is replete with history, poetry, and philosophy, but also slavery, broken marriages, passion, and not-so-secret lovers.
Kim Gattas - Atlantic


(Starred review) Alharthi throws the reader into the midst of a tangled family drama…. The novel rewards readers willing to assemble the pieces of Alharthi’s puzzle into a whole, and is all the more satisfying for the complexity of its tale.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review) Readers will come to this novel… and will leave with a sense of original storytelling, rich characterization, and transparently bright language, expertly translated. Highly recommended.
Library Journal


(Starred review) Althari’s unique structure demands vigilant participation as it is more jigsaw puzzle than linear narrative…. Pieced together, a robust village emerges, of alliances and betrayals, survival and murder, surrender and escape. Patient readers will be seductively, magnificently rewarded.
Booklist


(Starred review) [A] sweeping story of generational and societal change…. A richly layered, ambitious work that teems with human struggles and contradictions, providing fascinating insight into Omani history and society.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for CELESTIAL BODIES … then take off on your own:

1. Celestial Bodies, set in a village outside of Muscat, Oman, depicts a culture unknown to most of us in the West. What have you learned, what surprised you, what angered, even shocked, you?

2. Outwardly, women have little, in any, power in Mideast society. But things are not always what they seem. Talk about the kind of subtle, invisible power that the women in Celestial Bodies wield outside the traditional norms.

3. Most of the chapters are told in the third person point-of-view, except for Abdallah, Mayya's husband, who speaks to us in his own voice. Why might Alharthi have made the decision to let Abdallah tell his own story?

4. Speaking of Abdallah and Mayya, when Abdallah asks his wife if she loves him, she responds, "It's the Egyptian films, have they eaten your brain?" What do you make of her response? What does she mean? How does Abdallah react?

5. How are the characters in this novel trapped by the past? Who is trying to escape the past? Who is trying to ignore, or paper over, the past?

6. In what way does the novel hint at currents of change coming to this very traditional society?

6. Much has been made of the book's structure with multiple points of view and shifting time frames. It's even been referred to as a puzzle with each chapter providing a single piece of the picture. Did you find the narrative choice difficult to follow? Why might Alharthi have chosen to write her novel using this fragmented technique?

7. The book's title, literally, means "ladies of the moon." How does this title (perhaps more so than Celestial Bodies) reflect the novel?

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

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Celine 
Peter Heller, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451493897


Summary
From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars and The Painter, a luminous, masterful novel of suspense--the story of Celine, an elegant, aristocratic private eye who specializes in reuniting families, trying to make amends for a loss in her own past.

Working out of her jewel box of an apartment at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, Celine has made a career of tracking down missing persons, and she has a better record at it than the FBI.

But when a young woman, Gabriela, asks for her help, a world of mystery and sorrow opens up. Gabriela's father was a photographer who went missing on the border of Montana and Wyoming. He was assumed to have died from a grizzly mauling, but his body was never found.

Now, as Celine and her partner head to Yellowstone National Park, investigating a trail gone cold, it becomes clear that they are being followed—that this is a case someone desperately wants to keep closed.

Inspired by the life of Heller’s own remarkable mother, a chic and iconoclastic private eye, Celine is a deeply personal novel, a wildly engrossing story of family, privilege, and childhood loss. Combining the exquisite plotting and gorgeous evocation of nature that have become his hallmarks, Peter Heller gives us his finest work to date. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—February 13, 1959
• Raised—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Dartmouth College; M.F.A, Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Iowa Writers' Workshop's Michener Fellowship; National Outdoor's Book Award
• Currently—lives in Denver, Colorado


Peter Heller is a longtime contributor to NPR, and a contributing editor at Outside Magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure. He is an award winning adventure writer and the author of four books of literary nonfiction. The Dog Stars, his first novel, was published in 2012.

Heller was born and raised in New York. He attended high school in Vermont and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where he became an outdoorsman and whitewater kayaker. He traveled the world as an expedition kayaker, writing about challenging descents in the Pamirs, the Tien Shan mountains, the Caucuses, Central America and Peru.

At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received an MFA in fiction and poetry, he won a Michener fellowship for his epic poem "The Psalms of Malvine."  He has worked as a dishwasher, construction worker, logger, offshore fisherman, kayak instructor, river guide, and world class pizza deliverer. Some of these stories can be found in Set Free in China, Sojourns on the Edge. In the winter of 2002 he joined, on the ground team, the most ambitious whitewater expedition in history as it made its way through the treacherous Tsangpo Gorge in Eastern Tibet. He chronicled what has been called "The Last Great Adventure Prize" for Outside, and in his book Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River.

The gorge—three times deeper than the Grand Canyon—is sacred to Buddhists, and is the inspiration for James Hilton’s Shangri La.  It is so deep there are tigers and leopards in the bottom and raging 25,000 foot peaks at the top, and so remote and difficult to traverse that a mythical waterfall, sought by explorers since Victorian times, was documented for the first time in 1998 by a team from National Geographic. The book won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, was number three on Entertainment Weekly’s "Must List" of all pop culture, and a Denver Post review ranked it "up there with any adventure writing ever written."

In December, 2005, on assignment for National Geographic Adventure, he joined the crew of an eco-pirate ship belonging to the radical environmental group the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as it sailed to Antarctica to hunt down and disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet.

The ship is all black, sails under a jolly Roger, and two days south of Tasmania the engineers came on deck and welded a big blade called the Can Opener to the bow—a weapon designed to gut the hulls of ships.  In The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals, Heller recounts fierce gales, forty foot seas, rammings, near-sinkings, and a committed crew’s clear-eyed willingness to die to save a whale.  The book was published in 2007.

In the fall of 2007 Heller was invited by the team who made the acclaimed film The Cove to accompany them in a clandestine filming mission into the guarded dolphin-killing cove in Taiji, Japan. Heller paddled into the inlet with four other surfers while a pod of pilot whales was being slaughtered. He was outfitted with a helmet cam, and the terrible footage can be seen in the movie. The Cove went on to win an Academy Award. Heller wrote about the experience for Men’s Journal.

Heller’s most recent memoir, about surfing from California down the coast of Mexico, Kook: What Surfing Taught Me about Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, was published in 2010. Can a man drop everything in the middle of his life, pick up a surfboard and, apprenticing himself to local masters, learn to ride a big, fast wave in six months? Can he learn to finally love and commit to someone else? Can he care for the oceans, which are in crisis? The answers are in. The book won a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it a "powerful memoir…about love: of a woman, of living, of the sea." It also won the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. (From the author's website.)

In 2012, Heller published his first novel, The Dog Stars, to wide acclaim. It received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist and was chosen as a "Best Book of the Month" by both Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Heller currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Book Reviews
This is a mystery that needs to be savored; be prepared to treat yourself to prose that is lush but never overblown and to be transported to the various landscapes in America featured in the book. Heller betrays his painter’s roots in where his eye strays and where his focus is in his writing. Some readers may find his attention to setting detracts from the story being told; he draws the reader into realistic places as well as fully realized characters.  READ MORE 
Cara Kless - LitLovers


A terrific piece of fiction.… A pulpy, twisty plot.… Celine is tough, tired, and very funny—exactly the sort of person you want to spend 300 pages with. This may be hardboiled fiction, but it’s made with a free-range egg and served with a side of Jacques Pepin’s mustard sauce.
Craig Fehrman - Outside Magazine


Despite its intriguing premise, Heller’s third novel is a missing persons mystery that never quite finds its mark.… Heller, a gifted nature writer as well as novelist, handles certain set pieces well. But too often the novel seems lost in the wilderness.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Celine is a paradox, a Sarah Lawrence blue blood who is also a licensed PI…a quick draw and a crack shot.… Heller blends suspense with beautiful descriptive writing of both nature and civilization to create a winner. —Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY
Library Journal


(Starred review.) This captivating, tender, brainy, and funny tale of the mysterious powers of beauty and grief, nature and family will leave readers hoping that Heller is planning a National Park series featuring this stealthy, irrepressible duo.
Booklist


[T]he book's best moments come in its evocative descriptions of the American West in early autumn. Celine herself is a delight.… An imperfect but largely satisfying detective novel anchored by a charming and unforgettable heroine.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What tone does the opening scene of the book set for the rest of the story, in both establishing the atmosphere and its main themes and characters?

2. How did the interweaving of Celine’s backstory with that of Paul’s and his family’s create tension and momentum as you read?

3. Discuss the different, and even opposite, sides of Celine’s and Pete’s personalities—their hard-edged, more masculine sides and their softer, artistic, and sensitive sides. How do their careers allow both of those sides to prosper, and what does their unique relationship suggest about what they love about each other?

4. How does the couple balance out each other’s strengths and weaknesses to make for an effective partnership at home and in work? Does either of them seem more dominant in either space?

5. How does Celine’s complicated experience with motherhood motivate her work as a private investigator? Did you feel that that blurring of professional and personal lines enhanced or hindered her relationship with her clients—especially with Gabriela?

6. Celine imagines that for Gabriela home is a "space within the relative safety of her own skin." Celine may share this sensibility to some degree. Which of her actions, tendencies, and memories in the book are most reflective of this very private and self-protective mindset?

7. How does an urban versus a rural setting bring out different sides of different characters, especially Celine’s? Can you track a progression of what kinds of places they settle in depending on their moods and mindsets, or is their mood more affected by where they are at any given time?

8. What service does Celine offer her clients on a more psychological level, beyond her unearthing of the facts of certain mysteries in their lives? Do you think she absorbs their secrets and suffering, and, if so, how does that motivate her to continue to the next case, even at the age of sixty-eight?

9. How does Hank take up the work of emotional excavation and investigation on his mother, perhaps work she’s unable to do herself? What does this suggest about our abilities to confront our own pasts with clear eyes?

10. What do all of the characters’ secrets, revealed to us gradually throughout the book, have in common? How do the characters differ in the steps they have to take to discover their own truths?

11. Although Celine’s role as a mother is a paramount focus of the book, what did you also take away from reading about the complicated role of fathers in their children’s lives? Do you think that Celine or Hank has more in common with Gabriela in this sense?

12. When Celine considers Paul’s circumstances for disappearing and leaving Gabriela, she displays a great deal of compassion—something that’s key to why she’s a good investigator. How do you think she’s been able to channel that in spite of all that she experienced as a child?

13. The book makes the case that the world feels different after the 9/11 attacks, and also uses the grandeur of nature to indicate the smallness of humanity. Did you feel at the end of the book that ultimately humanity’s preservation was worth the effort despite these perspectives? What do those scales of comparison illustrate about how we understand our own power in the universe? Which characters are most accepting of that balance in the novel?

14. What sacrifices does Celine make for her clients, especially for Paul in regard to his involvement in the Chilean coup? Do you think they’re grateful for what she does?

15. Think about your own family and how you have dealt, individually and collectively, with secrets and difficult times. How would things have been different for your family if the losses Paul and Gabriela faced transpired for you? Could you empathize with either or both of them?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Cellist of Sarajevo 
Steven Galloway, 2008
Penguin Group USA
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483653

Summary  
This brilliant novel with universal resonance tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst.

One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills twenty-two people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope.

Meanwhile, Kenan steels himself for his weekly walk through the dangerous streets to collect water for his family on the other side of town, and Dragan, a man Kenan doesn’t know, tries to make his way towards the source of the free meal he knows is waiting. Both men are almost paralyzed with fear, uncertain when the next shot will land on the bridges or streets they must cross, unwilling to talk to their old friends of what life was once like before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is “Arrow,” the pseudonymous name of a gifted female sniper, who is asked to protect the cellist from a hidden shooter who is out to kill him as he plays his memorial to the victims.

In this beautiful and unforgettable novel, Steven Galloway has taken an extraordinary, imaginative leap to create a story that speaks powerfully to the dignity and generosity of the human spirit under extraordinary duress. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—July, 1975
• Where—Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—University of College of the Cariboo; University 
   of British Columbia
• Currently—New Westminster, Btitish Columbia


Steven Galloway, a Canadian author, was born in Vancouver and raised in Kamloops, both in British Columbia. He attended the University College of the Cariboo and the University of British Columbia. His debut novel, Finnie Walsh (2000), was nominated for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. His second novel, Ascension (2003), was nominated for the BC Book Prizes' Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and has been translated into numerous languages.

His third novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008), was heralded as "the work of an expert" by the Guardian, and has become an international bestseller and sold in 20 countries. Galloway has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia and taught and mentored creative writing in The Writer's Studio, at the writing and publishing program at Simon Fraser University. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews 
In this elegiac novel inspired by an actual event during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Steven Galloway explores the brutality of war and the redemptive power of music. Crafted with unforgettable imagery and heartbreaking simplicity, his small book speaks forcefully to the triumph of the spirit in the face of overwhelming despair.
Washington Post


Canadian Galloway delivers a tense and haunting novel following four people trying to survive war-torn Sarajevo. After a mortar attack kills 22 people waiting in line to buy bread, an unnamed cellist vows to play at the point of impact for 22 days. Meanwhile, Arrow, a young woman sniper, picks off soldiers; Kenan makes a dangerous trek to get water for his family; and Dragan, who sent his wife and son out of the city at the start of the war, works at a bakery and trades bread in exchange for shelter. Arrow's assigned to protect the cellist, but when she's eventually ordered to commit a different kind of killing, she must decide who she is and why she kills. Dragan believes he can protect himself through isolation, but that changes when he runs into a friend of his wife's attempting to cross a street targeted by snipers. Kenan is repeatedly challenged by his fear and a cantankerous neighbor. All the while, the cellist continues to play. With wonderfully drawn characters and a stripped-down narrative, Galloway brings to life a distant conflict.
Publishers Weekly


A bread line in besieged Sarajevo. A mortar lobbed by Serb soldiers on the hill. Death for 22 people. A cellist sees it all and determines to honor the dead-and perhaps assuage his own pain-by playing Albinoni's Adagio on the spot for 22 days. And so Galloway opens his first novel, inspired by true events, weaving together four lives to tell the awful story of Sarajevo's devastation. Aside from the cellist, there's Kenan, who risks his life every few days to carry plastic canisters to the brewery and retrieve water for his family. Dragan, who got his family out before the bombs started falling, works at the bakery for, literally, his daily bread. Both must cower on street corners and watch those who risk crossing get shot or killed. Arrow, who uses an alias, is a sniper desperate to defend her city and just as desperate not to compromise her humanity by hating the men who rain death down on the city. In the end, each takes a stand, small or large, to assure that the "Sarajevo that [they want] to live is alive again." Galloway writes simply and affectingly, occasionally resorting to cliché and just as often hitting a sweet, clear note that makes the siege of Sarajevo very real.
Library Journal


Inspired by Vedran Smailovic, the cellist who, in 1992, played in a bombed-out Sarajevo square for 22 days in memory of the 22 people who were killed by a mortar attack, this is a novel about four people trying to maintain a semblance of their humanity in the besieged city.... [Galloway] effectively creates a fifth character in the city itself, capturing the details among the rubble and destruction that give added weight to his memorable novel. —Elliot Mandel
Booklist


Four people struggle to stay alive in war-torn Sarajevo, remembering the simple pleasures of their old routines as they settle into horrifying, desperate new ones. On a day during the brutal siege of Sarajevo—an occupation that ultimately lasted years and claimed tens of thousands of lives-a mortar attack kills 22 people waiting for bread as a once famous cellist watches from his window. In tribute, he decides to play his cello in the street for 22 days, which will likely get him killed, given the hordes of snipers waiting in the hills above the city. But Arrow, an angry young female sniper, is cryptically assigned to protect him. As she stalks his potential killers, she begins to confront her own rationale for murder. Meanwhile, two ordinary citizens try to survive another day in the hell that Sarajevo has become. Kenan, a young father, traverses the ravaged city in search of water for his family and, as a favor, for a neighbor. The only safe haven for clean drinking water is a brewery across town, and the trek is both difficult and dangerous. On the journey, Kenan passes the tragic remains of his old life, including the office building, now burnt down, where he used to work and the park, now unsafe, where he used to spend time with a friend. Meanwhile, Dragan, a middle-aged baker, runs into an old acquaintance as he goes searching for bread. The two literally dodge bullets as they make their way through the streets. As violence rages in a city whose vibrance now lives only in the memories of its dying residents, the cellist continues his beautiful act of defiance, playing on through the bullets. Indelible imagery and heartbreaking characters give authority to this chilling story and make human a crisis typically overlooked in literature.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What effect does the constant confrontation of war and occupation have on each narrator? Does suffering, violence and loss ever become normalized for them? What is it like to live in this kind of anarchy—especially when symbols of peace and power have been extinguished (the eternal flame from WWII, the Kosovo Olympic stadium now used as a burial ground)? And what does it mean to have the color, beauty, and vibrancy of music and flowers (left behind for the cellist) introduced?

2. How has life changed in the city since the arrival of the men on the hills? What resources, both physical and mental, are the four characters in the book using to help them survive? What is involved in day-to-day living? How would you fare under these same conditions—and what would be your greatest challenges?

3. Each chapter in the novel is told through the lens of one of the four main characters (including the cellist) in the story. How does this strategy color our reading? How might our experience be different if told in first person? If it were told in a more journalistic way?

4. How do each of the narrators (Arrow, Dragan, Kenan) view their fellow citizens? How do they each look upon their struggles, choices, and their attitudes? What makes them not give up on each other? Does Kenan’s classification of the “three types of people” (144) ring true to you?

5. Do you think the author intends for the reader to be sympathetic to Arrow’s life and career trajectory? What prevents (or encourages) us from fully engaging, trusting, relating to her? Do you think war forces everyone to compromise something in themselves—their attitude, their moral compass?

6. What are the goals of “the men on the hill”? What exactly is it they are trying to destroy? What do they come to represent for the main characters—and what separates them from Arrow?

7. In the beginning of the novel, Dragan is said to avoid his friends and coworkers because “the destruction of the living is too much for him,” Arrow assumes a new name to distance herself from her role as a sniper, and Kenan takes refuge in his new ritual of obtaining water for his family. How have the three used rituals as ways to cope with their fear of what is happening in the city? At the end of the book, do you feel that their experiences of the cellist’s performances have changed how they deal with the danger around them? In what way?

8. What force does music have upon the war torn state—and what powers does it have over the lives of the characters? (For Kenan, Arrow, and Dragan? For the cellist himself?) Do you find yourself relating to the power of the cellist’s performances? Are there parallel moments in your life where you also experienced such sudden awakening, or realization?

9. “Sarajevo was a great city for walking.” How does the mapping of the landscape—the physical and psychic layout of the city—affect the narrative? How does our intimacy with this map affect our experience of the story?

10. In one of his early chapters, Kenan is particularly disturbed by the interruption and shelled state of the tram’s service (“The war will not be over until the trams run again”) and the destruction of the National Library (“the most visible manifestation of a society he was proud of”)—representing for him basic civilization. What signs, services, and signals do you consider pillars of civilization?

11. Why do you think the sniper avoids taking his shot at the cellist—especially when he has such ample opportunity?

12. Why does Dragan take such drastic measures to prevent the dead man’s body from being filmed by the journalist? What does the author suggest through this as a lesson for the living? What are we to do to prevent the horror of war from becoming commonplace, something to tune our televisions out from?

13. Were you surprised by Arrow’s final act of protest? Do you think she was ultimately able to reclaim herself, her identity? Do you think she succeeded?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Centaur 
John Updike, 1963
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449912164


Summary  
Winner, National Book Award

In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lose touch with his life.

Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
   Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
   Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
   National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
   and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
   1990


With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.

In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.

Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.

Although autobiographical elements appear in the Rabbit books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.

Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.

• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.

• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
A brilliant achievement...No one should need to be told that Updike has a mastery of the language matched in our time only by the finest poets.
Saturday Review

Unsurpassed...Natural, pertinent, fresh, subtle, and superbly written
Newsweek

Updike is one of the most exquisite masters of prose style produced by 20th century America. Yet, his novels have been faulted for lacking any sense of action or character development. It appears at times that his ability to spin lovely phrases of delicate beauty and nuance overwhelm his desire to tell a simple, important story in the lives of his characters. Updike's novels raise the question of whether beauty of expression, the lyrical telling of a captured moment of human time is, itself, enough to justify a great work of art.In contrast, his short stories are seen by many as masterful in every respect, both for their prose style that approaches poetic expression and for the stories they convey. Some critics believe that had Updike produced only short stories and poems, his role in American letters would be even more celebrated. But it is Updike's novels that have brought him the greatest fame and attention and which resulted in his appearance on the covers of TIME magazine two times during his career.
Wikipedia

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)

But also consider these LitLover talkiing points for The Centaur:

1. What contributes to George Caldwell's poor opinion of himself? Why does he feel he is about to die? Does George exasperate you or inspire sympathy?

2. What is Peter's view of his father? How does that view change during the course of the novel? How does their relationship develop? How are both father and son changed—or what do both come to learn—by the novel's end?

3. What role does the blizzard play in this work?

4. In what way is this story a retelling of the myth of Chiron? According to Greek mythology, a centaur was one of a race of creatures with the head, arms and trunk of a man and the body and legs of a horse. Chiron was considered the noblest of the centaurs. (if you don't have it in your library, dear reader, do pick up a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology. It's a must!)

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

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The Center of Everything 
Laura Moriarty, 2003
Hyperion Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780786888450


Summary
In Laura Moriarty's extraordinary first novel, a young girl tries to make sense of an unruly world spinning around her. Growing up with a single mother who is chronically out of work and dating a married man, 10-year old Evelyn Bucknow learns early how to fend for herself.

Offering an affecting portrayal of a troubled mother/daughter relationship, one in which the daughter is very often expected to play the role of the adult, the novel also gives readers a searing rendering of the claustrophobia of small town mid-western life, as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl.

Evelyn must come to terms with the heartbreaking lesson of first love—that not all loves are meant to be—and determine who she is and who she wants to be. Stuck in the middle of Kansas, between best friends, and in the midst of her mother's love, Evelyn finds herself...in The Center of Everything. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 24, 1970
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.S.W. and M.A., University of Kansas
• Currently—Lives in Lawrence, Kansas


Laura Moriarty received her master’s degree from the University of Kansas, and was awarded the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. The Center of Everything is Moriarty's first novel. Her second, The Rest of her Life, was published in 2007, While I'm Falling in 2009, and The Chaperone in 2012. (From the publisher.)

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• There are other Laura Moriartys I shouldn't be confused with: Laura Moriarty the poet, and Laura Moriarty the crime writer. If it helps, I'm Laura Eugenia Moriarty, though I've never used my middle name professionally.

• I got my first job when I was sixteen, cooking burgers at McDonald's. I've been a vegetarian since I was ten, so it was a little hard on me. I'm also technically inept and kind of dreamy, so I frustrated the guy who worked the toaster to the point where he threatened to strangle me on a daily basis. I kept that job for two years. I gave Evelyn a job at McDonald's too, and I made her similarly unsuccessful.

• Another job I was really bad at was tending bar. I was an exchange student at the University of Malta about ten years ago. I thought I wanted to go to medical school, so I signed up to take all these organic chemistry and physiology classes. In Malta. It was terrible. The Maltese students were into chemistry. I had a lab partner named Ester Carbone. There was a rumor my instructor had his house built in the shape of a benzene molecule. I couldn't keep up. I dropped out in February, and I needed money. Malta has pretty strict employment laws, and the only job I could get was an illegal one, working at a bar. I don't know anything about mixed drinks, and I don't speak Maltese. I think I was supposed to stand behind the bar be American and female and smile, but I ended up squinting at people a lot, so eventually, I was in the back, doing dishes. That was the year I started writing.

• The Center of Everything has a few autobiographical moments, but not many. I grew up with three sisters in Montana. When you say you're from Montana, people get this wistful look in their eyes. I think they've seen too many Brad Pitt movies. I saw A River Runs Through It, which is set in my hometown, Bozeman. That movie drove me nuts: I don't think anyone is even wearing coat in the whole movie. They can't keep filming up there in August and tricking everyone. Of course, now I live in Maine.

• I have tender hands, and the worst thing in the world, for me, is going to an event that requires a lot of hand shaking. Some people shake nicely, but some people have a death grip, and it's really painful. The thing is, you can't tell who's going to be a death gripper and who isn't. Big, strapping men have shaken my hand gently, but an elderly woman I met last month almost brought me to my knees. She was smiling the whole time. I went to a hand shaking event a month ago, and I went along with the shaking, because I didn't want to look rude or standoffish or freaky about germs. But hand shaking just kills me. I'm not sure what to do about it. I went back to Phillips Exeter a month ago, and a very polite student reintroduced himself to me and extended his hand to shake. I actually tried to high five him. He looked at me like I was a crazy person. My sister told me I should take a cue from Bob Dole and carry a pen in my right hand all the time, so I might try that.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:

It's difficult to pick just one, of course. But I will say that while I was writing The Center of Everything, I read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World, and it made a strong impression on me. I only knew about Sagan from watching the Nova Channel when I was a kid, but I happened upon an essay he'd written before he died. I was so impressed I went to the library and checked out some of his books. In The Demon Haunted World, Sagan stresses the importance of skepticism and rational reasoning when considering the mysteries of the universe.

It's easy for us today to see the insanity of the witchcraft trials, but Sagan gives a sympathetic account of how frightening the world must have seemed in those times, and how quickly our ability to reason can be dismissed in the face of fear and superstition. Today, Sagan points out, we have crop circles, alien abductions, and religious fundamentalism; the book has a great chapter called "The Baloney Detection Kit," an important tool for any open-minded skeptic. What I like most about Sagan is that he seems skeptical without coming across as cynical. He looks at the vastness of the universe and the intricacy of the natural world with so much wonder and awe, and he's able to translate it to a reader who isn't a scientist, such as myself. I also noticed how he refrains from making fun or putting down his opponents; there's such a generosity of spirit in his writing. I tried to put a bit of Sagan in Evelyn, the narrator of The Center of Everything. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Laura Moriarty's debut novel has the makings of something wearily familiar: the Midwestern mother-daughter coming-of-age story, featuring at least one episode in which Mom leaves home looking like a movie star but winds up collapsing in tears. Happily, Ms. Moriarty's artful, enveloping book is a lot more interesting than its genre initially suggests. It traces not only stormy adolescence, but also the essential stages of Evelyn's moral and intellectual evolution.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


It's not easy to build a novel around a personality, but Moriarty does it well.
Anne Stephenson - USA Today


Lively and endearing… complete tour of…conflicts between mother and daughter, as well as between the narrator's hopes and dreams.
Denver Post & Rocky Mountian News


Teriffic…. Moriarty has steady confidence…expertly wringing poignancy from…young lives…. A deeply satisfying novel
San Diego Union Tribune


For 10-year-old Evelyn Bucknow, there really is no place like home. On all the world maps she's ever seen, the United States has been smack dab in the middle, with Kansas in the middle of that. "I feel so lucky to live here, right in the center," she proclaims, in Moriarty's wonderfully down-to-earth debut. Dazzled by visions of Ronald Reagan on the television, the twinkle in his eye and his contention that "God put America between two oceans on purpose," Evelyn's youthful optimism is shaken by her young single mother Tina's inability to take control of her life. As Tina falls for her married boss, who gives her a car (his contribution to the trickle-down theory) but leaves her pregnant and shattered, Evelyn grows closer to her neighbor, a curly-haired scamp named Travis (who has eyes only for Evelyn's stunning friend, Deena) and her Bible-thumping grandmother, a regular listener to Jerry Falwell's radio show. As a teenager, she is influenced by a couple of liberal-minded teachers, one an emigre from New York and the other an introverted biology instructor intent on teaching evolution, but she never cuts her family ties. With renewed faith in her scatterbrained but endearing mother and with college on the horizon, she begins to find her place in the social and political spectrum and to appreciate the vastness of a world that just might extend beyond the Sunflower State. Moriarty deftly treads the line between adolescence and adulthood, and insecurity and self-assurance, offering a moving portrait of life in blue-collar middle America.
Publishers Weekly


Evelyn Bucknow's world has been quite small up till now. She and her mother live in Treeline Colonies, a collection of cramped apartments teetering on the edge of a highway in the middle of Kansas. Her grandmother visits every week, smelling of cigarettes and bearing gifts, including stories about God and Wichita, where she lives with her husband, the grandfather Evelyn has never met and the father her mother no longer speaks to. But she is getting older, and luckily she takes the reader along as she enters a widening world of new friends, cruel enemies, fresh pain, and Travis Rowley, "thief, breaker of locks, my own dark avenger and first true love." This world is a place of hard knocks and little self-pity, especially for the charming and prescient Evelyn. Moriarty builds an addictive and moving portrait of this poor, Midwestern girl in the Eighties, reminiscent of Dolores in Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, so well realized that one forgets it is fiction and so infectious that one never wants to put it down, even after turning to the last page. Essential for fiction collections. —Rachel Collins
Library Journal


(Adult/High School) Evelyn Bucknow, 10 years old at the start of this novel, lives with her single mother. Struggling to make ends meet, Tina is a loving, if sometimes absentminded, parent. Won over by the seemingly kind attention of her married boss, she has an affair that leaves her pregnant and in dire financial straits when she is fired from her job. Evelyn narrates the story, and readers witness her growing maturity in the face of circumstances that are beyond her control. With dawning awareness and increasing resentment, she sees that her mother's poor choices are creating havoc in their lives. Evelyn is determined to avoid the same mistakes and use her intelligence to get out of the cycle of poverty that is so much a part of her youth. YAs will enjoy this engrossing novel and connect to the authentic and changing voice Moriarity gives Evelyn as she grows into adulthood. Her thoughts and feelings ring true to the angst and insecurity that are often associated with adolescence. Readers, along with the protagonist, feel sympathy and understanding for human failings. —Julie Dasso, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
School Library Journal


A pleasantly wry, spunky debut, set in the Reagan era, about a fatherless girl who uses her brains as the way out of her mother's hopeless welfare state. Ten-year-old Evelyn Bucknow, plain but brainy, has learned something about the inequities of the world from her less-than-privileged, conservative vantage point in Kerrville, Kansas. Her Vietnam vet grandfather has disowned Evelyn's mother, Tina, for her early sins and still considers her a "whore." Evelyn's grandmother, Eileen, is an Evangelical Reaganite who doesn't believe Tina will make it to heaven. And Evelyn's own fourth-grade classmates rub in her state of impecunious fatherlessness. Yet Evelyn is at the top of her class, winning the science prize over the town's rich girl because our heroine plays by the rules. And even when her first love and neighbor, handsome kleptomaniac Travis Rowley, falls ungratefully for Evelyn's beautiful new friend Deena, Evelyn resists the entrapments of failure that the welfare state seems to expect of her. Much as in another recent storyteller clashing with a dim-bulbed mom (Stephanie Rosenfeld's Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu, p. 638), Evelyn finds her wits sharpened by adversity and by her mother's ill planning-in this case, her getting pregnant by a kind but married boss, who skips town. Still, when it seems the new baby's retardation is the demonstration of God's just deserts, Evelyn finds strength—and Moriarty pumps literary vigor into her narrative—by reversing a reader's expectations. Evelyn's voice is a lone, steely cry against the chorus of small-town righteousness for which President Reagan's TV speeches form the background noise. And while Moriarty is no fancy prose stylist, shelistens carefully to the speech of her characters, and Evelyn and Tina's voices, especially, ring true without sounding dopey or sentimental. Among the plethora of first novels tracking preteen daughters of sorry single mothers, Moriarty's gutsy opener is hard not to like.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Who is narrating? What historic or other signposts are available to the reader so that the story can be located in time and place? To whom or what does the title refer?

2. What do you think of Evelyn, Tina, and Eileen? What about Tina's father? What kind of people are they? What do they look like? What is Sam's role in the family and in the story? Share your impressions of other characters that stand out, and why.

3. When do you learn the narrator's name? What is going on in the story when this occurs? What, if any, is the significance of the scene where the narrator's name is revealed? When do you learn the narrator's name? What is going on in the story when this occurs? What, if any, is the significance of the scene where the narrator's name is revealed?

4. How does Moriarty use language to reflect the experiences and thoughts of the characters? Examine and discuss whether or not Evelyn's thoughts and spoken words are reflective of a child's point of view, and why. Share some examples that you find effective and/or moving.

5. How do Evelyn's feelings about her mother affect your feelings about Tina? Explore whether or not you are sympathetic or disgusted by Tina, and why. At the end of Chapter 11, why does Evelyn not wipe her mother's kiss off of her forehead? Share some examples of how Moriarty brings out the mother/daughter relationship and whether or not you can relate to it, and why.

6. Why do you believe Tina doesn't speak to her father? How do you respond when you learn that he told the family that a "little horse" is coming to dinner? Discuss this scene, and its implications. Consider how such a small phrase can reveal so much.

7. The car that doesn't shift is one of the many symbols Moriarty uses. What is its symbolism? Share some of the other symbols used throughout the story and how they are utilized.

8. Discuss the whole school milieu that Moriarty evokes in The Center of Everything. What are the roles of friendship pins and particular pieces of clothing in the lives of grade-school kids? What are your memories and experiences of these years? Share whether or not you think Moriarty successfully conveys these school experiences, and why.

9. Discuss the use of religion as a recurring theme throughout the book. As a storytelling device, what purpose does it serve? Why would a man as "religious" as Tina's father shun his daughter and be so unforgiving? How does Eileen live her beliefs? How does religion affect Evelyn? What happens at the church meeting with the healer? Why do people believe in healers? Share whether or not Tina comes to believe in some sort of religion, and why.

10. Why does Moriarty use the struggle between evolution and creationism in the story? What makes it particularly useful here? Why do people have this debate? Examine whether or not the characters' positions ring true, and why. What would you say to those who have different beliefs than yours?

11. Do you believe Deena's pregnancy is motivated by Travis' change of plans? Should Evelyn have shared this Deena? What position does Evelyn put herself in by doing this?

12. How does the car accident that kills Traci affect Evelyn? What motivates Evelyn to initially keep Traci's belongings hidden? Examine the significance and possible symbolism of Evelyn hanging onto Traci's clothes and locket into high school, and what they represent to Evelyn after Traci's death.

13. Discuss the underlining theme throughout the novel of being chosen or not being chosen.

14. Discuss Moriarty's use of foreshadowing throughout The Center of Everything. How does it influence your reading?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Center of the World
Jacqueline Sheehan, 2015
Kensington Books
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781617738968


Summary
In this evocative and emotionally compelling novel, a mother and her adopted daughter each embark on a journey of self-discovery in the wake of a stunning revelation.

How do you keep a secret so huge that it could devastate everyone you care about?

For Kate Malloy, the answer is simple: one lie at a time. That’s how she has protected her daughter for more than a dozen years, shielding her from a terrible truth. Sofia, a fifteen-year-old soccer star living in New England, believes she was born in Mexico and legally adopted by Kate.

But a posthumous letter from her stepfather tells Sofia a different story—one of civil unrest and bloodshed, death-defying heroism and child-smuggling, harrowing sacrifice and desperate decisions.

Sofia’s trust in her mother is shattered. At last Kate must do what she knows is right—accompany Sofia back to Guatemala, the place where Kate found horror and heartache but also the greatest joy of her life.

As mother and daughter confront the damage done by years of dangerous yet necessary deceptions, they discover how much love, hope, and happiness may still remain—if they have the courage to face their past. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.

Currently on the faculty of Writers in Progress and Grub Street in Massachusetts, she also offers international workshops on the combination of yoga and writing. She writes travel articles about lesser-known destinations and lives in Massachusetts.

Novels
Sheehan's books include Truth (2003), reissued as The Comet's Tale: A Novel About Sojurner Truth (2011); Now & Then (2009); two Peaks Island novels, Lost & Found (2007) and Picture This (2012); and, most recently, The Center of the World (2015). (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
[A]n emotionally charged tale that explores the mother-daughter bond, set against the backdrop of the Guatemalan Civil War and complete with beautiful prose despite the atrocities.... Sheehan...expertly carries her narrative through war and peace, fear and security, and love and redemption.
Publishers Weekly


[A] breathtaking tale.... Sheehan's enthralling novel, through tales of grief and happiness, offers readers a strong sense of catharsis. The author smoothly captures the intricacies of cultural exchange with grace and intersection.... [A] captivating read. —Marian Mays, Butte-Silver Bow P.L., MT
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. After the massacre takes place, Kate Malloy reacts instantly to protect Sofia. What might have been an influence from her past that made her react so dramatically? The death of Kate’s mother is driving her decisions in other areas of her life. How does it resonate with Sophia?

2. Kate is a scientist and a graduate student who has little experience with children. Discuss her evolution of responding to Sofia as a mother while they are in Antigua.

3. There are complicated issues surrounding Kate’s decision to take Sofia out of Guatemala? Did she make the right choice? Was it right to pull the child out of her Mayan community? Was there any other choice that she could have made?

4. Times of war, disaster, and the constant state of heightened senses can throw people together in the illusion of love. Is this what happened to Kate and Will? Or did they fall in love so deeply, regardless of time? What other parallels pull the two of them together?

5.  Discuss how Will’s initial excitement about his job opportunity as a Language Specialist blinds him to the military forces at work in Guatemala?

6. What is Jenkins final revenge with Will? Discuss how a lifetime of war can create cruelty, as with Jenkins, or kindness and bravery, as in the case of Fernando.

7. Kate makes a choice to protect Sophia and Will. What price does she pay for lying about Sofia’s heritage and the circumstances of her adoption? How does it affect Sophia, Sam, and Kate?

8. How is it possible for Kate to remain in love with Will, and yet find another man to love and marry?

9. Kate is haunted by dreams about and visitations from Manuela, Sophia’s mother. Sophia has a deep inner knowledge that she a twin brother. How does the Mayan belief of ancestors relate to this story? Who are the ancestors who influence this story? Does your understanding of Martin’s motivations change over the course of the book?

10. Sam, Kate’s father, is a steady anchor for her, but he has also been scarred by war. How does he change from the experience of traveling to Guatemala?

11. Sophia is a soccer star at her Massachusetts high school. How do the threads of soccer bind Sophia to her homeland?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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A Certain Age 
Beatriz Williams, 2016
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062404954


Summary
The bestselling author of A Hundred Summers brings the Roaring Twenties brilliantly to life in this enchanting and compulsively readable tale of intrigue, romance, and scandal in New York Society, brimming with lush atmosphere, striking characters, and irresistible charm.

As the freedom of the Jazz Age transforms New York City, the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, Long Island, has done the unthinkable: she’s fallen in love with her young paramour, Captain Octavian Rofrano, a handsome aviator and hero of the Great War.

An intense and deeply honorable man, Octavian is devoted to the beautiful socialite of a certain age and wants to marry her. While times are changing and she does adore the Boy, divorce for a woman of Theresa’s wealth and social standing is out of the question, and there is no need; she has an understanding with Sylvo, her generous and well-respected philanderer husband.

But their relationship subtly shifts when her bachelor brother, Ox, decides to tie the knot with the sweet younger daughter of a newly wealthy inventor. Engaging a longstanding family tradition, Theresa enlists the Boy to act as her brother’s cavalier, presenting the family’s diamond rose ring to Ox’s intended, Miss Sophie Fortescue—and to check into the background of the little-known Fortescue family.

When Octavian meets Sophie, he falls under the spell of the pretty ingenue, even as he uncovers a shocking family secret. As the love triangle of Theresa, Octavian, and Sophie progresses, it transforms into a saga of divided loyalties, dangerous revelations, and surprising twists that will lead to a shocking transgression . . . and eventually force Theresa to make a bittersweet choice.

Full of the glamour, wit and delicious twists that are the hallmarks of Beatriz Williams’ fiction and alternating between Sophie’s spirited voice and Theresa’s vibrant timbre, A Certain Age is a beguiling reinterpretation of Richard Strauss’s comic opera Der Rosenkavalier, set against the sweeping decadence of Gatsby’s New York. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.B.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Greenwich, Connecticut


A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA from Columbia, Beatriz spent several years in New York and London hiding her early attempts at fiction, first on company laptops as a corporate and communications strategy consultant, and then as an at-home producer of small persons.

She now lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[A]ll the makings of a juicy soap opera ripe with scandalous affairs, family loyalties and the secrets of the rich and fabulous. Set in the Roaring Twenties in the high-society circles of New York City, Williams’ story is a rousing, enjoyable read.
Diana Andro - Fort Worth Star-Telegram


[A]ll it took was a few pages and I was hooked. A Certain Age is about the twenties, an era that has never really attracted my interest. In Williams’ hands however this time becomes as fresh and entertaining as possible. Because of her skills, readers are welcomed into the world of clubs and clandestine relationships.... Williams knows exactly how to capture the excitement of these people and this time.
Jackie K. Cooper - Huffington Post


A tale of Manhattan society in the Jazz Age, spiced liberally with secrets and scandal.... Chapters oscillate in time, ending on cliffhangers that can be jarring, but this novel is mainly propelled by its period-perfect prose style. A certain age, acutely observed.
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 help start a discussion for A Certain Age...then take off on your own:

1. What do you think of Theresa Marshall? Is it possible to feel sympathy for her? In what way might you say she is product of her times, reflecting the era in which she lives?

2. Consider Sophie Fortescue. Yes, she is innocent, but how else would you describe her? How does Sophie represent the rise of a new kind of woman in the early 20th century?

3. How did World War I impact Octavian--although he survived virtually unscathed on the outside, what internal scars does he carry?

4. What do Theresa and Octavian see in one another? She is twice his age, calls him Boyo, never by his name, and manipulates and controls him. What do both gain (aside from the obvious) from the relationship?

5. Describe the era itself in which Beatriz Williams sets her story. Williams herself has said A Certain Age reflects the conflict between "old money and new, young and old, past and present"? How so? Consider, too, the changes wrought by new technologies. Do you see any parallels between then and now?

6. Talk about the attraction between Sophie and Octavian and, especially, the connection they share from the past.

7. Why does Williams lead with the scandal and the "trial of the century"? In other words, why do readers get the "reveal" so early in the story? How does the knowledge affect your reading of the book?

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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Certain Girls 
Jennifer Weiner, 2008
Simon & Schuster
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781416561279


Summary
Readers fell in love with Cannie Shapiro, the smart, sharp-tongued, bighearted heroine of Good in Bed. Now Cannie's back. After her debut novel—a fictionalized (and highly sexualized) version of her life—became an overnight bestseller, she dropped out of the public eye and turned to writing science fiction under a pseudonym. She's happily married and has settled into a life that's wonderfully predictable.

As preparations for her daughter Joy's bat mitzvah begin, everything seems right in Cannie's world. Then Joy discovers the novel Cannie wrote years before and suddenly finds herself faced with what she thinks is the truth about her own conception—the story her mother hid from her all her life. When Cannie's husband surprises her by saying he wants to have a baby, the family is forced to reconsider their history, their future, and what it means to be truly happy.

Radiantly funny and tender, with Weiner's whip-smart dialogue and sharp observations of modern life, Certain Girls is an unforgettable story about love, loss, and the enduring bonds of family. (From the publisher.)

Weiner's debut novel, Good in Bed, was published in 2002; it's the "prequel" to Certain Girls.

Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1970
• Where—De Ridder, Louisiana, USA
• Raised—Simsbury, Connecticut
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania


Jennifer Weiner is an American writer, television producer, and former journalist. She is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Background
Weiner was born in DeRidder, Louisiana, where her father was stationed as an army physician. The next year, her family (including a younger sister and two brothers) moved to Simsbury, Connecticut, where Weiner spent her childhood.

Weiner's parents divorced when she was 16, and her mother came out as a lesbian at age 55. Weiner has said that she was "one of only nine Jewish kids in her high school class of 400" at Simsbury High School. She entered Princeton University at the age of 17 and received her bachelor of arts summa cum laude in English in 1991, having studied with J. D. McClatchy, Ann Lauterbach, John McPhee, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates. Her first published story, "Tour of Duty," appeared in Seventeen magazine in 1992.

After graduating from college, Weiner joined the Centre Daily Times in State College, Pennsylvania, where she managed the education beat and wrote a regular column called "Generation XIII" (referring to the 13th generation following the American Revolution), aka "Generation X." From there, she moved on to Kentucky's Lexington Herald-Leader, still penning her "Generation XIII" column, before finding a job with the Philadelphia Inquirer as a features reporter.

Novels and TV
Weiner continued to write for the Inquirer, freelancing on the side for Mademoiselle, Seventeen, and other publications, until after her first novel, Good in Bed, was published in 2001.

In 2005, her second novel, In Her Shoes (2002), was made into a feature film starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine by 20th Century Fox. Her sixth novel, Best Friends Forever, was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and made Publishers Weekly's list of the longest-running bestsellers of the year. To date, she is the author of 10 bestselling books, including nine novels and a collection of short stories, with a reported 11 million copies in print in 36 countries.

In addition to writing fiction, Weiner is a co-creator and executive producer of the (now-cancelled) ABC Family sitcom State of Georgia, and she is known for "live-tweeting" episodes of the reality dating shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. In 2011, Time magazine named her to its list of the Top 140 Twitter Feeds "shaping the conversation." She is a self-described feminist.

Personal
Weiner married attorney Adam Bonin in October of 2001. They have two children and separated amicably in 2010. As of 2014 she lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with her partner Bill Syken.

Gender bias in the media
Weiner has been a vocal critic of what she sees as the male bias in the publishing industry and the media, alleging that books by male authors are better received than those written by women, that is, reviewed more often and more highly praised by critics. In 2010, she told Huffington Post,

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book—in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.... I think it's irrefutable that when it comes to picking favorites—those lucky few writers who get the double reviews AND the fawning magazine profile AND the back-page essay space AND the op-ed...the Times tends to pick white guys.

In a 2011 interview with the Wall Street Journal blog Speakeasy, she said, "There are gatekeepers who say chick lit doesn’t deserve attention but then they review Stephen King." When Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom was published in 2010 to critical acclaim and extensive media coverage (including a cover story in Time), Weiner criticized what she saw as the ensuing "overcoverage," igniting a debate over whether the media's adulation of Franzen was an example of entrenched sexism within the literary establishment.

Though Weiner received some backlash from other female writers for her criticisms, a 2011 study by the organization VIDA bore out many of her claims, and Franzen himself, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, agreed with her:

To a considerable extent, I agree. When a male writer simply writes adequately about family, his book gets reviewed seriously, because: "Wow, a man has actually taken some interest in the emotional texture of daily life," whereas with a woman it’s liable to be labelled chick-lit. There is a long-standing gender imbalance in what goes into the canon, however you want to define the canon.

As for the label "chick lit", Weiner has expressed ambivalence towards it, embracing the genre it stands for while criticizing its use as a pejorative term for commercial women's fiction.

I’m not crazy about the label because I think it comes with a built-in assumption that you’ve written nothing more meaningful or substantial than a mouthful of cotton candy. As a result, critics react a certain way without ever reading the books.

In 2008, Weiner published a critique on her blog of a review by Curtis Sittenfeld of a Melissa Bank novel. Weiner deconstructs Sittenfeld's review, writing,

The more I think about the review, the more I think about the increasingly angry divide between ladies who write literature and chicks who write chick lit, the more it seems like a grown-up version of the smart versus pretty games of years ago; like so much jockeying for position in the cafeteria and mocking the girls who are nerdier/sluttier/stupider than you to make yourself feel more secure about your own place in the pecking order.

(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/21/2014.)

Book Reviews
In the emotional core of the book, Weiner portrays with tear-jerking precision both the long, dark shadows of a painful childhood and the excruciatingly small window of blissful closeness that parents get to enjoy with their kids before they grow up and start to know better. Weiner, who in interviews talks about growing up Jewish in a non-Jewish Connecticut town, dealing with her own parents' divorce and being plus-size herself, is a self-professed outsider, and it's that nose-pressed-up-against-the-glass quality that gives her writing such a punch. It's what makes her wish-fulfillment, happy-ending plots forgivable, and it's what makes Certain Girls the kind of book that gets under your skin, reminding you what it felt like to listen to your friend snap her retainer in the dark during a sleepover when you were 13 and capturing exactly what it feels like now, watching your child grow away from you and praying that someday she comes back.
Laura Zigman - Washington Post


Weiner is a talented and accomplished novelist, with real stylistic flair, excellent and sometimes laugh-out loud wit, and good insight into her characters...Cannie has retained her wit and her sharp takes on the world she lives in, but she has evolved. Weiner's voice is smart and edgy, and her male characters are sharply drawn. She writes about issues, such as the dynamics of family life, that are of interest to all humans.
Philadelphia Inquirer


Weiner displays her signature wry voice and sap-free knack for capturing heartfelt moments; an unexpected plot twist gives her story emotional heft. Fans should find Girls a worthy successor.
People


In this smart-mouthed sequel to Good in Bed (a chick-lit classic), heroine Cannie is older but thinner, and in a terrible tussle with her soon-to-be-bat mitzvahed daughter.
Good Housekeeping


A daughter's journey through teen angst to realizations about family, acceptance, love, and the nature of truth.
Elle


F0llowing the story collection The Guy Not Taken, Weiner turns in a hilarious sequel to her 2001 bestselling first novel, Good in Bed, revisiting the memorable and feisty Candace "Cannie" Shapiro. Flashing forward 13 years, the novel follows Cannie as she navigates the adolescent rebellion of her about-to-be bat mitzvahed daughter, Joy, and juggles her writing career; her relationship with her physician husband, Peter Krushelevansky; her ongoing weight struggles; and the occasional impasse with Joy's biological father, Bruce Guberman. Joy, whose premature birth resulted in her wearing hearing aids, has her own amusing take on her mother's overinvolvement in her life as the novel, with some contrivance, alternates perspectives. As her bat mitzvah approaches, Joy tries to make contact with her long absent maternal grandfather and seeks more time with Bruce. In addition, unbeknownst to Joy, Peter has expressed a desire to have a baby with Cannie, which means looking for a surrogate mother. Throughout, Weiner offers her signature snappy observations: ("good looks function as a get-out-of-everything-free card") and spot-on insights into human nature, with a few twists thrown in for good measure. She expends some energy getting readers up to speed on Good, but readers already involved with Cannie will enjoy this, despite Joy's equally strong voice.
Publishers Weekly


Weiner's sequel to her New York Times bestselling Good in Bed takes place 13 years later and is told from the perspectives of the first book's protagonist, Cannie Shapiro, and Joy, her teenage daughter. Rachel Botchan and Julie Dretzin competently and professionally narrate these motherdaughter roles in alternating chapters, a format that can be confusing at times. As the book and author are both popular with public library patrons, the audio version, too, should be purchased to meet demand.
Mary Knapp - Library Journal


Clear your calendar and prepare to read: Cannie Shapiro (of Good in Bed) is back! Cannie, now 42, has been married to her "Doctor Peter" for more than ten years, and "baby" Joy is turning 13. In alternating chapters covering roughly a year, Cannie and Joy share the emotion-packed experiences of parenting and being a teen. (At some point, Weiner may have planned this as The Bat Mitzvah Diaries.) Added complications are Peter's desire for a baby via surrogate and Joy's classmates' discovery of the sexy novel Cannie published a decade ago, Big Girls Don't Cry(i.e., Good in Bed). Joy vacillates between loving and hating her mother and her complex family structure, while Cannie struggles to let her baby grow up; readers will laugh and cry for them both. Returning in this sequel, among others, is Cannie's best friend, Sam, still looking for the perfect mate (i.e., an unmarried Jewish male under 60). With six best sellers in seven years, Weiner is a talented writer who consistently delivers the goods. (Note: F-kis sprinkled judiciously throughout.) An essential read for fans and an essential buy for public libraries.
Rebecca Kelm - School Library Journal


Weiner's sequel to her debut novel (Good in Bed, 2001) revisits that book's heroine 13 years later. When readers first met Candace "Cannie" Shapiro, she was 28, overweight and single. Still feisty as ever, Candace is now wife to beloved Peter and mother to 13-year-old daughter Joy. The chapters alternate, sometimes jerkily, between Candace's and Joy's points of view. Joy, a typical teenager, is embarrassed by her mother, and Candace worries about her changing relationship with her daughter. Above all, Candace tries to protect Joy and herself from her painful past, very publicly chronicled in her accidental bestseller, Big Girls Don't Cry, a highly sexualized fictional account of Candace's life. After Joy reads the book, she questions who her true family is, and whether her mother ever wanted her. At times Weiner tries too hard to be witty, and Joy sounds too much like Candace. Still, the narrative is often heartfelt and funny, and, while the plot occasionally meanders, there are surprisingly raw emotional elements at play and some nifty plot twists. As the story unfolds, Joy goes looking for her maternal grandfather and Candace and Peter search for a surrogate for a second child—and Weiner proves she isn't afraid to tackle the complexities of love, fear and grief. A touching examination of both the comic and tragic moments that mark the mother-daughter relationship.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. In the opening of the novel, Cannie thankfully observes how her daughter, Joy, is so different from herself. Joy, Cannie thinks, will have a better adolescence than her mother did. And yet it is their differences that cause such conflict and grief in the Krushelevansky household. In what ways are Cannie and Joy different? In what ways are they similar? How much of these differences are specific to Cannie and Joy and how much are common to all mother-daughter pairs?

2. Cannie loves her daughter so deeply and so enjoys being a mother that it is somewhat surprising to see how negatively she reacts to Peter's request that they have a child together. Why do you think she reacts this way?

3. On page 68, Joy seems enraged by Cannie's repetition of a familiar story about Joy's childhood. But Cannie can't figure out what has upset her daughter so. Identify moments in the novel where Joy is upset with something Cannie says or does, and Cannie doesn't understand why. Do you think Joy is being unfair, or is it Cannie who is overreacting?

4. Cannie tries to steer Joy away from the fashion magazines her aunt Elle devours because she thinks they're a "bad influence." What does Joy think? Do you agree or disagree with Cannie, and why? How does the novel provide evidence to support one opinion over the other?

5. Joy is constantly smoothing her hair over her ears to hide her hearing aids, or taking them out altogether. What is she really trying to cover up? Is she ultimately successful? Why or why not?

6. The author uses both Cannie's and Joy's point of view in order to emphasize the disconnect between the worlds of adult women andteenage girls. How else does this generation gap manifest in the novel? Is it really just that Cannie is "clueless"? Are Shari and Elle really that dissimilar from Amber and her friends? What does this novel say about growing up and about the different "types" of women in the world?

7. Cannie struggles with two absent fathers—her own, with whom she hasn't had a real relationship in decades, and her ex-boyfriend Bruce, who not only abandons her when he discovers that she is pregnant, but who isn't always the most attentive or responsible parent now that he's back in Joy's life. And then there's Peter, who isn't anyone's biological father but plays a father's role nonetheless. Compare and contrast Bruce Guberman, Lawrence Shapiro, and Peter Krushelevansky and their relationships to their families.

8. Describe how various children in this novel view their parents—particularly their mothers. How do you feel about these characters? Do you find the perspective of the children very different from that of the adults? Do you sympathize more with one "side" or another? Why or why not?

9. Joy notes on page 196 that her father's new wife, Emily, is so tiny and timid that Joy can't imagine her doing anything mean to anyone. But appearances often belie the truth. How do the appearances of the characters in this novel contradict who they are or what they are going through? Cite specific examples.

10. Even though Cannie would be fine with Joy going to her cousin Tyler's bar mitzvah, Joy decides to attend on the sly. What does Joy hope will happen at the party? What does she learn about herself and about her family?

11. Why do you think Cannie struggles so with the idea of surrogacy? What issues is she struggling with? How do you feel about the idea of pregnancy as a business arrangement -- or "babysitting," as some of the surrogates claim? Do you think Cannie is right that these women are asking far too little for what they are giving up? Why or why not?

12. On page 236, the author relays two news stories. One is about a sorority that dumps twenty-three girls from its roster, all of whom were either overweight, unattractive, or minorities. The other is about a 325-pound girl who commits suicide after being teased by classmates about her weight; the girl's mother is subsequently charged with neglect. What statement do you think the author is making about America's obsession with weight? Do you think these two news stories speak to the same issue, or is there a difference between them? Explain your opinion.

13. As Joy and her classmates approach their bar and bat mitzvah dates, they struggle to shed their childhood and be perceived as adults by greater society, especially their peers and families. Identify the various elements of so-called adulthood that these children try on. What is it that finally shows Joy what it means to be a grown-up?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Chalice
Nancy Bilyeau, 2013
Simon & Schuster
485 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781476708669


Summary
In the midst of England’s Reformation, a young novice will risk everything to defy the most powerful men of her era.

In 1538, England’s bloody power struggle between crown and cross threatens to tear the country apart. Novice Joanna Stafford has tasted the wrath of the royal court, discovered what lies within the king’s torture rooms, and escaped death at the hands of those desperate to possess the power of an ancient relic.

Even with all she has experienced, the quiet life is not for Joanna. Despite the possibilities of arrest and imprisonment, she becomes caught up in a shadowy international plot targeting Henry VIII himself. As the power plays turn vicious, Joanna realizes her role is more critical than she’d ever imagined. She must choose between those she loves most and assuming her part in a prophecy foretold by three seers. Repelled by violence, Joanna seizes a future with a man who loves her. But no matter how hard she tries, she cannot escape the spreading darkness of her destiny.

To learn the final, sinister piece of the prophecy, she flees across Europe with a corrupt spy sent by Spain. As she completes the puzzle in the dungeon of a twelfth-century Belgian fortress, Joanna realizes the life of Henry VIII as well as the future of Christendom are in her hands—hands that must someday hold the chalice that lies at the center of these deadly prophecies. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Born—N/A
• Raised—Livonia, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Nancy Bilyeau, author of The Crown (2012) and The Chalice (2013), is a writer and magazine editor who has worked on the staffs of InStyle, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. Her latest position is features editor of Du Jour magazine. A native of the Midwest, she graduated from the University of Michigan. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
( A Top Pick.) The novel is riveting, and provides fascinating insight into the lives of displaced nuns and priests during the tumultuous Tudor period. Bilyeau creates fully realized characters, with complex actions and emotions, driving the machinations of these historic personages.
RT Book Reviews


English history buffs and mystery fans alike will revel in Nancy Bilyeau's richly detailed sequel to The Crown.
Parade


I loved the story, the characters, and the rich detail of the novel, making you feel you are there with Joanna on every page. So much emotion and drama- as well as facts to keep you riveted from the first page. And surprise twists for even the most hard to please mystery fans! I loved it
Bonnie Sommerville - De Jour magazine


Bilyeau sends her plucky former novice back into the intrigue-laden court of Henry VIII.
Entertainment Weekly


Bilyeau paints a moving portrait of Catholicism during the Reformation and of reclusive, spiritual people adjusting to the world outside the cloister. This intriguing and suspenseful historical novel pairs well with C. J. Sansom’s Dissolution (2003) and has the insightful feminine perspective of Brenda Rickman Vantrease’s The Heretic’s Wife (2010).
Booklist


A historical novel set during the time of Henry VIII. It opens in Canterbury in 1528, when the heroine, Joanna Stafford, is only 17 and her mother, worried about her daughter's health, pretends to take her to benefit from healing waters there. In fact, it is her mother's desire to have her daughter meet a woman with the gift of prophecy, a woman who is the first to see the role Joanna is destined to play in the future of the ongoing conflict between the crown and the cross.... [S]he pays attention to the first of what will be three seers who reveal, in progressive parts, her ultimate destiny....  Joanna's interest in weaving tapestries is an appropriate analogy for this layered book of historical suspense.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What role does prophecy play in The Chalice? How does this idea of prophecy drive much of the book? What are your beliefs regarding seers and prophecies?

2. Why do you think Bilyeau uses a young novice like Joanna Stafford to carry out such important historic weight as to save Henry VIII or destroy him?

3. “Why must this burden fall upon me?” Joanna asks Edmund when they are in Blackfriars, and he answers, “It’s you. You are a woman unlike any other, Sister Joanna. I’ve tried to define this quality that sets you apart. I’ve never quite been able to.” Can you define it? How does Joanna’s character shape and affect the unfolding of the story? In what ways does Joanna’s character change over the course of the novel? In the end, how have the events of the novel changed her forever?

4. Who directs Gertrude Courtenay to find Joanna? Were you surprised by this revelation? How are Joanna and Gertrude’s lives bound up, beyond the fact of their relatedness by marriage? How do their fates become so entwined? And how does it tie back to Katherine of Aragon? Discuss, as well, how Gertrude and Joanna’s lives are directly impacted by the Boleyn family.

5. Joanna resists meeting the seers and hearing the prophecies, and yet Bilyeau writes, “We’d all been forced to abandon our dream. Yet now, because of what I’d revealed, a restoration was possible. Why didn’t I surge forward, snatching at my place in the prophecy, eager to bring back our way of life? But I couldn’t.” Why do you think she isn’t able to? What are the myriad ways in which Joanna resists her fate and why? Discuss the idea of free will versus fate, and fate versus destiny.

6. Geoffrey Scovill appears in several places to warn Joanna or to help her or to persuade her to be with him. He claims he wants only her happiness, and yet when it is time for Joanna to marry Edmund, he prevents it. What was your reaction to his behavior at that moment? Sometimes Joanna wants Geoffrey near her, yet at other times she pushes him away. What is your impression of their relationship? When they meet again in the cemetery, Scovill regrets that he didn’t appreciate his wife, Beatrice, more before her death. What do you think Scovill has learned about love and life? What do you think the future holds for Geoffrey and Joanna’s relationship?

7. When Joanna is alone in Blackfriars with Edmund Sommerville, Bilyeau writes, “I waited, with eyes shut. After I don’t know how long, his lips pressed against mine, but so gently I almost doubted it was happening. I had never felt a touch this tender. I ached for more from him.” How does Bilyeau handle the delicate issue of desire in a work about celibate religious men and women? How does Joanna deal with her own desire?

8. Just as Gardiner once used Joanna’s father to get her to look for the Athelstan crown, now when Jacquard Rolin threatens Edmund’s life to force Joanna to complete the prophecy. When she complies, what does this say about Joanna’s character? Her sense of loyalty? How might you respond in a similar situation?

9. When Joanna meets Ambassador Chapuys in Antwerp, she says, “I know that you and others look to me to put a stop to evil. But in so doing, I am creating evil…The man who spied for Gardiner in Hertfordshire and now Master Adams? God would not have it so – I know in my heart it’s not right.” What do you think about what Joanna says? How do you think Chapuys feels after she’s said this? Have you ever been confronted with such a dilemma in your life?

10. “Was I indeed a fool not to see that this was the plan from the beginning – for me to kill the king of England?” Bilyeau writes. “I’d hoped, and perhaps it was grossly unrealistic, that in the end I would commit some act, such as the abortive attempt to rescue the body of Thomas Becket, that would turn the tide of history…But how wrong I was, how tragically wrong. This, then, was the prophecy that I’d been intertwined with since I was seventeen. To be a murderess.” Were you surprised by this revelation as well? Were you hoping for a different sort of prophecy as Joanna was? What might it have been?

11. When Bishop Gardiner takes Joanna to see Gertrude in the Tower of London and Joanna asks her if she regrets she entered into conspiracy, given how much she has lost – her husband, her son, her homes and fortune – Gertrude hisses, “Never.” How do you feel about this? Do you find it hard to believe? What sort of a person is Gertrude? How would you feel in her situation?

12. Joanna asks Bishop Gardiner if he has written the article that forbids religious people from marrying with her in mind, and he says, “Did you really think that religious policy for the entire kingdom was written just to strike out at you? Revenge, perhaps, revenge on my part for your failure to secure the Athelstan crown or perhaps for your recent flouting of my will?” Joanna says nothing, and then he finishes by saying, “You have never been a consideration of that import. Not everyone is meant to play a significant part in the affairs of the world, Joanna.” Do you believe him? Does Joanna? What do you think is the truth?

13. In the beginning of The Chalice, John is a madman, running around Dartford spouting scripture about doom. In the end, he turns up at Joanna’s house in Dartford sane, well-dressed, and working as a wood collector. Do you think he is a symbol and/or metaphor for something in the novel? If so, discuss what it might be.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Chalk Man 
C.J. Tudor, 2018
Crown/Archetype
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524760984


Summary
A riveting and relentlessly compelling psychological suspense debut that weaves a mystery about a childhood game gone dangerously awry, and will keep readers guessing right up to the shocking ending

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get.

The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.

In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he's put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank … until one of them turns up dead.

That's when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.

Expertly alternating between flashbacks and the present day, The Chalk Man is the very best kind of suspense novel, one where every character is wonderfully fleshed out and compelling, where every mystery has a satisfying payoff, and where the twists will shock even the savviest reader. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
C. J. Tudor, born as Caroline and called "Caz," lives in Nottingham, England, with her partner and young daughter. As told to Crime Fiction Lover, she always enjoyed writing but didn't settle into it until her mid-thirties.

Over the years she has worked as a copywriter, television presenter, voice-over artist, and dog walker, which she says she was doing while working on her debut novel. She is now thrilled to be able to write full-time, and doesn’t miss chasing wet dogs through muddy fields all that much. The Chalk Man is her first novel. (Adapted from the publisher and crimefictionlover.com.)

Book Reviews
[G]astly events in the picturesque English town of Anderbury, with the nightmarish inevitability of the Grimmest of tales.…Though Tudor makes a couple of rookie missteps, including excessive plot twists … her storytelling prowess is undeniable.
Publishers Weekly


A band of preteens in a quaint English village in the late 1980s confront true evil and grapple with the lifelong consequences in this gripping debut mystery/thriller.… Taut plotting, smooth writing, and a compelling premise. —Kiera Parrott
Library Journal


[The] first-person narration alternates between past and present, taking full advantage of chapter-ending cliffhangers. A swift, cleverly plotted debut novel that ably captures the insular, slightly sinister feel of a small village.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our GENERIC MYSTERY QUESTIONS to start a discussion for The Chalk Man … then take off on your own:

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

1. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
2. Are they plausible or implausible?
3. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

1. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
2. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
3. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
4. Perhaps it's too predictable.
5. Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

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

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

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Chalk's Outline
J.J. Hensley, 2014
Bad Day Books
284 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781628278019


Summary
Three years ago, popular college professor Cyprus Keller (Resolve) planned a murder.

Two years ago, former Pittsburgh Homicide Detective Jackson Channing (Measure Twice) pulled himself together and got sober.

Today, Robert Chalk has a rifle, a plan, and a target.

When Cyprus Keller and his wife Kaitlyn relocated to rural Virginia, they did all they could to put the past behind them. However, the situation becomes uncomfortable when Jackson Channing appears in Keller's living room and begins questioning Keller about the past. The situation becomes unbearable when bullets start flying through the front window.

In a flash, it becomes apparent that Jackson Channing is not the only person who has an interest in Keller. If Channing wants to unravel Keller's past, he is going to have to make sure the professor has a future. To keep Keller safe and uncover the mystery of who wants him dead, Channing takes Keller and his wife to Pittsburgh, where it all started.

As a deadly chess game plays out in the city streets, Channing discovers Keller is a complicated man of secrets who is anything but a typical murder suspect. The two men team up in an effort to stop a dangerous assassin who intends on killing Keller, no matter the cost.

As Robert Chalk works his way through the plan he has outlined, he becomes consumed with the ultimate goal. No matter how many lives he has to take along the way, Cyprus Keller must die. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974-75
• Where—Huntington, West Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Pennsylvania State University; M.S., Columbia Southern University
• Awards—Suspense Magazine Best Debut; Authors on the Air, Top 10 of the Year
• Currently—lives near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania


J.J. Hensley spent three years as a police officer in Virginia before becoming a special agent with the U.S. Secret Service in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. He draws upon those experiences to write novels full of suspense and insight.

Hensley, who is originally from Huntington, WV, graduated from Penn State University with a B.S. in Administration of Justice and has a M.S. in Criminal Justice Administration from Columbia Southern University. The author lives with his family near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hensley’s novel Resolve was named one of the Best Books of 2013 by Suspense Magazine and as a finalist for Best First Novel by the International Thriller Writers organization. His second book, Measure Twice, was released in 2014, and his third, Chalk's Outline, came out in 2016.

In addition to his three novels, Hensley writes short stories—"Vehemence" was published in 2014, and "Four Days Forever" appeared in the 2015 anthology, Legacy.

Hensley is a member of the International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow J.J. Hensley on Facebook.

Discussion Questions
We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.

GENERIC DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they flat, one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers embed hidden clues in plain sight, slipping them in casually, almost in passing. Did you pick them out, or were you...clueless? Once you've finished the book, go back to locate the clues hidden in plain sight. How skillful was the author in burying them?

4. Good crime writers also tease us with red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray? Does your author try to throw you off track? If so, were you tripped up?

5. Talk about the twists & turns—those surprising plot developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray.

1. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense?
2. Are they plausible or implausible?
3. Do they feel forced and gratuitous—inserted merely to extend the story?

6. Does the author ratchet up the suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? A what point does the suspense start to build? Where does it climax...then perhaps start rising again?

7. A good ending is essential in any mystery or crime thriller: it should ease up on tension, answer questions, and tidy up loose ends. Does the ending accomplish those goals?

1. Is the conclusion probable or believable?
2. Is it organic, growing out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 3)?
3. Or does the ending come out of the blue, feeling forced or tacked-on?
4. Perhaps it's too predictable.
5. Can you envision a different or better ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

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

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Chance: A Novel 
Kem Nunn, 2014
Scribner
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743289245


Summary
From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author comes a suspenseful and mind-bending novel about Eldon Chance, a forensic neuropsychiatrist at the end of his rope.

A dark tale involving psychiatric mystery, sexual obsession, fractured identities, and terrifyingly realistic violence—Chance is set amid the back streets of California’s Bay Area, far from the cleansing breezes of the ocean. Dr. Eldon Chance, a neuropsychiatrist, is a man primed for spectacular ruin.

Into Dr. Chance’s blighted life walks Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused, attractive wife of an Oakland homicide detective, a violent and jealous man. Jaclyn appears to be suffering from a dissociative identity disorder. In time, Chance will fall into bed with her—or is it with her alter ego, the voracious and volatile Jackie Black? The not-so-good doctor, despite his professional training, isn’t quite sure—and thereby hangs his fascination with her.

Meanwhile, Chance also meets a young man named D, a self-styled, streetwise philosopher skilled in the art of the blade. It is around this trio of unique and dangerous individuals that long guarded secrets begin to unravel, obsessions grow, and the doctor’s carefully arranged life comes to the brink of implosion.

Amid San Francisco’s fluid, ever-shifting fog, in the cool, gray city of love, Dr. Chance will at last be forced to live up to his name. Chance is a twisted, harrowing, and impossible-to-put-down head trip through the fun house of fate, mesmerizing until the very last page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Raised—Pomona, California, USA
• Education—M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
• Currently—lives in southern California


Kem Nunn is an American fiction novelist, surfer, magazine and television writer from California. His novels have been described as "surf-noir" for their dark themes, political overtones and surf settings. He is the author of five novels, including his seminal surf novel Tapping the Source and, more recently, Chance. According to the San Diego Union Tribune:

He remembers being mesmerized the first time he saw surfers while camping with his parents at Salt Creek near Dana Point.

Although Nunn was a skinny, not-so-athletic kid who didn't swim very well, the allure of being propelled by waves was irresistible. His first rides were on air mats and crude homemade surfboards. He merely dabbled with surfing as a youth. It wasn't until he was deep into his 20s that he became immersed in the surfer's life.

He drifted from his teens into his 20s, turning underachieving into an art decades before eternal slacking became fashionable with Generation X.

"My 20s were a lost decade. I didn't do much of anything," he said. 
—Terry Rodgers, San Diego Union Tribune, August 17, 2004

Nunn has collaborated with producer David Milch on the HBO Western drama series Deadwood. Milch and Nunn co-created the HBO series John from Cincinnati, a surfing series set in Imperial Beach, California which premiered in 2007.

Kem Nunn grew up in Pomona and Northern California. In addition to Tapping the Source (1984), he also wrote Dogs of Winter (1997), Unassigned Territory (1986), Pomona Queen (1992), Tijuana Straits (2004), and Chance (2014). He received an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/15/2014 .)

Book Reviews
Kem Nunn's crafty new novel…Chance takes place in the twilit world of noir, where people and things are never what they seem. But this book isn't a tragic noir like Vertigo or Out of the Past, whose cunning femme fatale Jaclyn/Jackie sometimes brings to mind. It's a farce, of an unusually violent and dark-spirited kind…Nunn, a connoisseur of slippery slopes, just gives his uptight protagonist a gentle shove and watches him go down, every bump and stumble duly noted with a sort of dry relish
Terrence Rafferty - New York Times Book Review


Is it too much to compare Kem Nunn to Raymond Chandler? Like Chandler, Nunn’s great subject is what lies beneath the surface, the desolation that infuses us at every turn.... The power of this disturbing and provocative novel is that it leaves us unmoored among the signposts of a morally ambiguous universe in which, even after we have finished reading, it is uncertain who has been feeding whom.
Los Angeles Times


Sentence by sentence Nunn achieves a muscular eloquence—I almost wrote elegance—unusual in what at first appears to be a genre novel. There hasn't been fiction this good about a San Francisco medical professional gone off the rails over a woman since Frank Norris' deluded dentist in the 1899 novel McTeague.
Alan Cheuse - San Francisco Chronicle


The book could be considered a pulp masterpiece. It has everything from a femme fatale to a dystopian setting where the California sun is blotted out by a black-ash fog from wildfires burning around the Bay. Chance is the kind of everyman whose bad choices are noir staples. But calling it pulp would undersell the sheer genius of the writing, which uses the convention of mystery-thrillers to create a psychological allegory of Freud’s construct, id, ego and superego at war with themselves.
Arizona Republic


(Starred review.) [A] brilliant and cerebral psychological thriller. The quiet, ordered life of Dr. Eldon Chance, a recently divorced Bay Area forensic neuropsychiatrist, begins to unravel when he makes a series of ill-fated decisions.... [A]surprising conclusion.
Publishers Weekly


Psychiatrist Eldon Chance, who makes his living providing testimony in court cases, is appalled to see the life he had so carefully constructed for himself break apart.... Nunn...excels at creating complicated, flawed characters with fascinating backstories. This gritty, twisted tale will be of prime interest to noir fans. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist


[G]ritty.... Nunn, a writer with a gift for subtlety and wordplay, spins a story that is both mesmerizing and a bit confusing. Readers will find Nunn's story well-written for the most part but not always engaging. Lovers of Nunn's previous novels may discover in Chance a less than creditable antihero.
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)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

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Chances Are...
Richard Russo, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101947746


Summary
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes a new revelation: a riveting story about the abiding yet complex power of friendship.

One beautiful September day, three men convene on Martha's Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college circa the sixties.

They couldn't have been more different then, or even today—Lincoln's a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher, and Mickey a musician beyond his rockin' age.

But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since a Memorial Day weekend right here on the Vineyard in 1971: the disappearance of the woman each of them loved—Jacy Calloway.

Now, more than forty years later, as this new weekend unfolds, three lives are displayed in their entirety while the distant past confounds the present like a relentless squall of surprise and discovery.

Shot through with Russo's trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are… also introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader's heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga of how friendship's bonds are every bit as constricting and rewarding as those of family or any other community.

For both longtime fans and lucky newcomers, Chances Are… is a stunning demonstration of a highly acclaimed author deepening and expanding his remarkable achievement. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 15, 1949
• Where—Johnstown, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F. A. and Ph.D., University of Arizona
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Camden, Maine


Prizewinning author Richard Russo is regarded by many critics as the best writer about small-town America since Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. "He doesn't over-sentimentalize [small towns]," said Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air." Nor does he belittle the dreams and hardships of his working-class characters. "I come from a blue-collar family myself and I think he gets the class interactions; he just really nails class in his novels," said Corrigan.

When Russo left his own native small town in upstate New York, it was with hopes of becoming a college professor. But during his graduate studies, he began to have second thoughts about the academic life. While finishing up his doctorate, he took a creative writing class; and a new career path opened in front of him.

Russo's first novel set the tone for much of his later work. The story of an ailing industrial town and the interwoven lives of its inhabitants, Mohawk won critical praise for its witty, engaging style. In subsequent books, he has brought us a dazzling cast of characters, mostly working-class men and women who are struggling with the problems of everyday life (poor health, unemployment, mounting bills, failed marriages) in dilapidated, claustrophobic burghs that have—like their denizens—seen better days. In 2001, Russo received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, a brilliant, tragicomic set-piece that explores past and present relationships in a once-thriving Maine town whose textile mill and shirt factory have gone bust.

Russo's vision of America would be bleak, except for the wit and optimism he infuses into his stories. Even when his characters are less than lovable, they are funny, rueful, and unfailingly human. "There's a version of myself that I still see in a kind of alternative universe and it's some small town in upstate New York or someplace like that," Russo said in an interview. That ability to envision himself in the bars and diners of small-town America has served him well. "After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life," said the fiction writer Annie Proulx. "And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are."

Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:

• In 1994, Russo's book Nobody's Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis. Newman also starred in the 1998 movie Twilight, for which Russo wrote the screenplay. Russo now divides his time between writing fiction and writing for the movies.

• When he wrote his first books, Russo was employed full-time as a college teacher and would stop at the local diner between classes to work on his novels. After the success of Nobody's Food (the book and movie), he was able to quit teaching—but he still likes to write in tight spots, such as the Camden Deli. It's "a less lonely way to write," he told USA Today. "I'm less self-conscious when it's not so quiet."

• When asked what his favorite books are, he offered this list:

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens—All of Dickens, really. The breadth of his canvas, the importance he places on vivid minor characters, his understanding that comedy is serious business. And in the character of Pip, I learned, even before I understood I'd learned it, that we recognize ourselves in a character's weakness as much than his strength. When Pip is ashamed of Joe, the best man he knows, we see ourselves, and it's terrible, hard-won knowledge. 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain—Twain's great novel demonstrates that you can go to the very darkest places if you're armed with a sense of humor. His study of American bigotry, ignorance, arrogance, and violence remains so fresh today, alas, because human nature remains pretty constant. I understand the contemporary controversy, of course. Huck's discovery that Jim is a man is hardly a blinding revelation to black readers, but the idea that much of what we've been taught by people in authority is a crock should resonate with everybody. Especially these days.  

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—Mostly, I suppose, because his concerns -- class, money, the invention of self -- are so central to the American experience. Fitzgerald understood that our most vivid dreams are often rooted in self-doubt and weakness. Many people imagine that we identify with strength and virtue. Fitzgerald knew better.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck—For the beauty of the book's omniscience. It's fine for writers to be humble. Most of us have a lot to be humble about. But it does you no good to be timid. Pretend to be God? Why not? (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Chances Are… is, at heart, less a mystery than an evocation of what happens when [its characters] discover that "the membrane separating sympathy from pity could be paper thin." … The cloud of remorse that hangs over [the novel] can be affecting precisely because these old friends have so much difficulty articulating their emotions. Will they be able to open up to whatever the future holds?
Alida Becker - New York Times Book Review


A cascade of charm…. Each [character is] so appealing that you hate to let him go, though you’ll quickly feel just as fond of the next one…. One of the great pleasures of Chances Are… stems from how gracefully Russo moves the story along two time frames, creating that uncanny sense of memories that feel simultaneously near and remote…. Russo is an undeniably endearing writer, and chances are this story will draw you back to the most consequential moments in your own life.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


[Russo’s] first novel in ten years hits the ball out of the park…. Along with his wry eye for irony and regret, [Russo] offers up a compelling mystery…. When the denouement comes, it’s a stunner. Nevertheless, all bombshells feel earned. If you’re on a hammock in the Vineyard or under a tent in Acadia, or slumped over the fire escape of your hot city apartment, chances are your chances are awfully good that you’ll lap up this gripping, wise, and wonderful summer treat.
Mameve Medwed - Boston Globe


Irresistible… with the complexities of human relationships, from first love to parenthood to aging [and] rich with humor.
Colette Bancroft - Tampa Bay Times


[Russo] mixes his signature themes—father-and-son relationships, unrequited love, small-town living, and the hiccups of aging—with stealthy clue-dropping in a slow-to-build mystery…. In the final stretch, surprising, long-kept secrets are revealed. This is vintage Russo.
Publishers Weekly


Pulitzer Prize winner Russo returns with a bittersweet tale of longtime friendship and lost love that has a surprising—and surprisingly satisfying—ending.
Library Journal


(Starred review) For his first stand-alone novel in 10 years, Russo has written a bewitching tale of male friendship with thriller elements…. This is vintage Russo with a cunning twist.
Booklist


(Starred review) No one understands men better than Russo, and no one is more eloquent in explaining how they think, suffer, and love.… [Chances Are…] blends everything we love about this author… in [his] distinctive, richly observed world and his inimitable ironic voice.
Kirkus Reviews


A surprising work that is as much a mystery as a meditation on secrets and friendship…. [A] moving portrait of aging men who discover the world's worst-kept secret:  You may not know the people you thought you were closest to.
BookPage

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for CHANCES ARE … and then take off on your own:

1. How would you describe each of the three men—Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey—who show up on Martha's Vineyard for this reunion? Talk about the differences in their personalities and backgrounds. Given those differences, what drew them together, years ago, as friends? Of the three, do you have a particular favorite?

2. How has each man changed over the past 44 years, since they were last all together. Importantly, how have they not changed: in what sense do their past lives, even their relationships with their fathers, say, continue to shape them? As Faulkner famously quipped, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." How does that summation play out for Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey?

3. What was Jacy Calloway like? Discuss the revelations that eventually emerge about her life. What was her relationship with each of the younger men?

4. Lincoln wonders, "What would Jacy think if she could see them now?… Three goddamn old men." How, in fact, might she see them?

5. One of the book's themes is the way random events can set life on a seemingly irreversible path. As Russo writes, "yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless."  How do you see that observation occurring throughout Chances Are….

6. Follow-up to Question 5: What missed opportunities or moral failings, revealed early on in the lives of the characters, have continued to shape each of them and how they have lived their lives?

7. What is the prevailing attitude of the male characters in this book toward women? As Teddy says, "Men. We ignore women when they’re right and we start wars and generally screw things up." The retired policeman even admits, "We don’t do right by girls."

8. Were you caught off guard by the plot twist at the end? Did you see it coming... or not? Some critics have said they didn't even though, in a close re-read, the clues are all there. The Boston Globe, for instance, called the final reveal a "stunner" and a "bombshell," yet one that felt "earned." What were your expectations? 

9. How does the book's title, taken from a Johnny Mathis song, stand in for the book's theme?

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

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The Chaneysville Incident
David Bradley, 1981
HarperCollins
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060916817


Summary
The legends say something happened in Chaneysville.

The Chaneysville Incident is the powerful story of one man's obsession with discovering what that "something" was—a quest that takes the brilliant and bitter young black historian John Washington back through the secrets and buried evil of his heritage. Returning home to care for and then bury his father's closest friend and his own guardian, Old Jack Crawley, he comes upon the scant records of his family's proud and tragic history, which he drives himself to reconstruct and accept.

This is the story of John's relationship with his family, the town, and the woman he loves; and also between the past and the present, between oppression and guilt, hate and violence, love and acceptance. From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1950
• Where—Bedford, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.A., University of London
• Awards—Academy Award (American Academy of Arts and Letters); PEN/Faulkner Award;
   O. Henry Award
• Currently—lives in San Diego, California


David Henry Bradley, Jr. is the author of South Street and The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982.

The Chaneysville Incident, inspired in part by the real-life discovery of the graves of a group of runaway slaves on a farm near Chaneysville in Bedford County, PA, where Bradley was born, also earned Bradley a 1982 Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His short story "You Remember the Pinmill" (winner of a 2014 O. Henry Award) was published in 2013 in Narrative magazine.

Since 1985, Bradley has worked primarily in creative nonfiction, with pieces in Esquire, Redbook, New York Times, Philadelphia Magazine, Pennsylvania Gazette, Nation and Dissent. His work has also appeared online in Obit, Narrative, and Brevity.

Bradley holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in United States Studies from the University of London. He was an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. On June 12, 2011, he appeared 60 Minutes in a segment regarding the censored version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved June 10, 2015.)

Book Reviews
David Bradley's second book, The Chaneysville Incident, took ten years to complete. A deeply moving work set in the mountains of Pennsylvania, it received the PEN/Faulkner Award as the best novel of 1981. John Washington, the novel's hero, is a history professor and scholar...[who] uncovers the mystery of his father's suicide; learns the heroic truth of how his great-grandfather, an ex-slave, was killed when caught helping twelve runaways; discovers that his contempt for his mother is misplaced; and creates within himself a place of compassion where commitment to Judith can grow.... In beautiful and precise prose, Bradley tells the story of how...an intelligent reclamation of one's heritage can be a source of strength and peace.
Sacred Life

Discussion Questions
(These questions were kindly offered to LitLovers by Gail Golden, who developed them for The BFF Book Club. Thank you, Gail.)

1. In what year is the novel set in the first chapter?& How did you feel about the way that the stories unfolded as the book progressed? If this book had been written in 2015, how might the story between John and Judith have been different?

2. Why is it significant that John is an historian? How does that help to connect him to his father, Moses Washington, especially after Moses’s death?

3. What is the significance of coffee and toddies in this novel? How does the choice of drinks help the reader to understand the progress of Judith’s and John’s relationship?

4. Do we ever really know the actual names of the Town and the County? Are the names important? Why or why not?

5. John shows anger throughout the book. How do the foci of his anger change as the story progresses, or how does it become clearer to the reader the focus of the anger?

6. Share one of the vignettes that help us to understand why John felt so hostile toward the town in which he grew up.

7. Discuss the role of Old Jack Crawley in this story.

8. Compare the home of Old Jack and the one that Moses built for himself. Compare the two sides of the Hill on which the Blacks in the Town lived.

9. Describe the evolution of C. K. Washington which led up to the “incident.” Did that vignette help you to understand why Moses took his own life? Do you think that it helped John to understand?

10. If you had been one of the thirteen involved in the “incident,” would you have chosen the way that they did? Why do you think that John and Moses had such a hard time finding out about the “incident?”

11. What was the significance at the end of the book of John’s resealing the folio that Moses had left him? Why did he burn up all of his notes? He says that he is leaving the folio intact for anyone in the future who might look into it. Who might that be?

12. Did this book give you any new knowledge/revelations about slavery, the slave trade, runners, and/or the Underground Railroad? Has the book changed your previous notions about PA or any of the other states mentioned in the book?

13. Pick one minor character in the book and discuss him/her and how he/she fit into the centuries-old story told in the book.

14. Is there a particular episode in the novel that you would like to discuss?
(Questions prepared and submitted by Gail Golden of The BFF Book Club.)

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A Change in Altitude 
Anita Shreve, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316020718


Summary
Margaret and Patrick have been married just a few months when they set off on what they hope will be a great adventure-a year living in Kenya. Margaret quickly realizes there is a great deal she doesn't know about the complex mores of her new home, and about her own husband.

A British couple invites the newlyweds to join on a climbing expedition to Mount Kenya, and they eagerly agree. But during their harrowing ascent, a horrific accident occurs. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Margaret struggles to understand what happened on the mountain and how these events have transformed her and her marriage, perhaps forever.

A Change in Altitude illuminates the inner landscape of a couple, the irrevocable impact of tragedy, and the elusive nature of forgiveness. With stunning language and striking emotional intensity, Anita Shreve transports us to the exotic panoramas of Africa and into the core of our most intimate relationships. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1946
• Raised—Dedham, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A. Tufts University
• Awards—PEN/L.L. Winship Award; O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts


Anita Shreve is the acclaimed author of nearly 20 books—including two works of nonfiction and 17 of fiction. Her novels include, most recently, Stella Bain (2013), as well as The Weight of Water (1997), a finalist for England's Orange prize; The Pilot's Wife (1998), a selection of Oprah's Book Club; All He Even Wanted (2003), Body Surfing (2007); Testimony (2008); A Change in Altitude (2010). She lives in Massachusetts. (From the publisher.)

More
For many readers, the appeal of Anita Shreve’s novels is their ability to combine all of the escapist elements of a good beach read with the kind of thoughtful complexity not generally associated with romantic fiction. Shreve’s books are loaded with enough adultery, eroticism, and passion to make anyone keep flipping the pages, but the writer whom People magazine once dubbed a “master storyteller” is also concerned with the complexities of her characters’ motivations, relationships, and lives.

Shreve’s novels draw on her diverse experiences as a teacher and journalist: she began writing fiction while teaching high school, and was awarded an O. Henry Prize in 1975 for her story, "Past the Island, Drifting." She then spent several years working as a journalist in Africa, and later returned to the States to raise her children. In the 1980s, she wrote about women’s issues, which resulted in two nonfiction books—Remaking Motherhood and Women Together, Women Alone—before breaking into mainstream fiction with Eden Close in 1989.

This interest in women’s lives—their struggles and success, families and friendships—informs all of Shreve’s fiction. The combination of her journalist’s eye for detail and her literary ear for the telling turn of phrase mean that Shreve can spin a story that is dense, atmospheric, and believable. Shreve incorporates the pull of the sea—the inexorable tides, the unpredictable surf—into her characters’ lives the way Willa Cather worked the beauty and wildness of the Midwestern plains into her fiction. In Fortune’s Rocks and The Weight of Water, the sea becomes a character itself, evocative and ultimately consuming. In Sea Glass, Shreve takes the metaphor as far as she can, where characters are tested again and again, only to emerge stronger by surviving the ravages of life.

A domestic sensualist, Shreve makes use of the emblems of household life to a high degree, letting a home tell its stories just as much as its inhabitants do, and even recycling the same house through different books and periods of time, giving it a sort of palimpsest effect, in which old stories burn through the newer ones, creating a historical montage. "A house with any kind of age will have dozens of stories to tell," she says. "I suppose if a novelist could live long enough, one could base an entire oeuvre on the lives that weave in and out of an antique house."

Shreve’s work is sometimes categorized as "women’s fiction," because of her focus on women’s sensibilties and plights. But her evocative and precise language and imagery take her beyond category fiction, and moderate the vein of sentimen-tality which threads through her books. Moreover, her kaleidoscopic view of history, her iron grip on the details and detritus of 19th-century life (which she sometimes inter-sperses with a 20th-century story), and her uncanny ability to replicate 19th-century dialogue without sounding fusty or fussy, make for novels that that are always absorbing and often riveting. If she has a flaw, it is that her imagery is sometimes too cinematic, but one can hardly fault her for that: after all, the call of Hollywood is surely as strong as the call of the sea for a writer as talented as Shreve. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Shreve, who worked in Kenya as a journalist early in her career, returns to that country in her slow latest, the story of a photojournalist and her doctor husband, whose temporary relocation abroad goes sour. The year-long research trip is an opportunity for Patrick, but leaves Margaret floundering in colonialist culture shock, feeling like “an actor in a play someone British had written for a previous generation.” When a climbing trip to Mt. Kenya goes fatally wrong, Margaret's role in the tragedy drives a quiet wedge between the couple. Compounding those stressors are multiple robberies and adulterous temptations, as well as Margaret's freelance work for a “controversial” newspaper. Written in a strangely emotionless third person, the novel is stuffed with travelogues and vignettes of privileged expatriate life, including the chestnut of Margaret feeling very guilty about being given a rug she admires. While some of these moments aren't bad, the scant dramatic tension and direct-to-video plot make this a slog.
Publishers Weekly


Margaret and Patrick are 28-year-old Bostonians living in Kenya in 1977. He's a doctor researching tropical diseases, while she dabbles in photography. They live in the guest house of Brits Arthur and Diana. An impulsive plan to climb to the top of Mount Kenya elicits varied responses from the group, which eventually will include a Swiss couple as well. While most see a challenge, if a mild one, Margaret is terrified, scrambling for a way to back out. Ultimately, tragedy strikes, and everyone, including Patrick, looks to Margaret as its cause. The country's race relations contribute to Margaret's feelings of remorse, pushing her to find a job and perhaps a new love. Verdict: The usual pinpoint precision of Shreve's (Testimony) prose is not in evidence here, as readers must work to discover the novel's time frame, and accusations of Margaret's complicity in the accident seem out of proportion, as does her sense of guilt. People who might consider an excursion to Mount Kenya will undoubtedly cancel their airfare and buy a new armchair instead. Fans will demand this one, though. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal


Shreve sends a young American couple up Mt. Kenya, with disastrous consequences for their marriage. Margaret and Patrick have been in Nairobi for three months. He came to pursue research in tropical diseases while offering his services as a doctor in free clinics; she was bored with her job at a Boston alternative weekly and hopes to find more interesting photography opportunities in Africa. Neither is an experienced climber, nor do they especially like their landlords, Arthur and Diana, who suggest the expedition. But they go along anyway, and it's athletic Diana who falls to her death. Is Margaret to blame because Diana was exasperated by her slowness and enraged by Arthur's attentions to the younger woman? Patrick thinks so and says so to his wife; their relationship is on shaky ground for the remainder of the story. It's not clear precisely what Shreve intends to convey in her tale. She unsparingly depicts the poverty and corruption of late-1970s Kenya and sends Margaret to work at a reforming newspaper whose editor is eventually arrested, but politics are not a central concern. Margaret, the point-of-view character, is a sensitive and thoughtful observer who can't seem to take hold of her life. Patrick will strike most readers as cold and judgmental from the start; it's hard to understand what Margaret ever saw in him, and her attraction to a reporter at the Kenya Morning Tribune isn't much more compelling. The second climb up Mt. Kenya, taken a year after the first, does not in the least meet Patrick's goal of expunging the "deadly silence" and "devastating mistrust" that have enveloped the couple, but it does restore Margaret's self-respect and make clearthe state of their marriage. Commendably tough-minded and unsentimental, but not very engaging.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. How would you interpret the novel’s title? Does the concept of altitude have significance in the story beyond its literal meaning?

2. During the drive to Mt. Kenya, Margaret and Patrick talk about whether photography detaches you from the present or helps you immerse yourself in it more fully (75). In your own life, do you find that taking photographs enriches experiences or prevents you from being fully in the moment?

3. When Diana brings Adhiambo to stay with Patrick and Margaret for the night, they disagree about how best to deal with the situation. Margaret seems more concerned about Adhiambo’s emotional well-being, while Patrick focuses on her physical state. In what way do their differing perspectives reflect other aspects of their characters? Do you think Adhiambo would have been better off if Margaret and Patrick had taken her to the hospital that night?

4. Throughout the novel, Margaret is struck by the way Kenyan characters use the phrase “Just all right” (67, 189, 246, 303). How would you interpret the meaning of this phrase? Why is it so surprising to Margaret?

5. How culpable is Margaret in what happens on the mountain? To what extent does the blame fall on others involved in the climb? Should a person be held responsible for the unintended consequences of her actions (124)?

6. Is Patrick right to confront Margaret about what happened on the mountain? Margaret argues that if he loves her and intends to stay with her, he should not have told her his opinion, while Patrick believes it is most important to be honest (125). What do you think is most important in a relationship, total honesty or sensitivity to the other’s feelings?

7. Why do you think Margaret feels so strongly about taking the photograph of the leopard? Are there parallels between this action and Diana’s behavior on the glacier? Have you ever put yourself in danger because of a momentary impulse? What do you think motivates actions of this kind?

8. What is your definition of infidelity? Does Margaret’s relationship with Rafiq constitute unfaithfulness to Patrick? Is there such a thing as emotional infidelity or is only physical cheating really cheating?

9. How much of a marriage’s success or failure do you think can be attributed to the love between husband and wife, and how much to external factors, such as jobs, finances, location, and other people? Patrick says, “I think couples need projects to keep them together” (271). Is he correct that a couple must put in effort to make their marriage work?

10. If the accident on the mountain had never occurred, do you think Margaret and Patrick’s relationship would have evolved differently? Would anything more have happened between Arthur and Margaret? Between Rafiq and Margaret?

11. Imagine Margaret and Patrick thirty years after the end of A Change in Altitude, looking back on their life in Africa. How do you think each of them would describe the trajectory of their relationship during this time?

12. Describe your response to the novel’s ending. Did you find it sad? Uplifting? Did you feel that things had worked out for the best?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Change of Heart 
Jodi Picoult, 2008
Simon & Schuster
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743496759


Summary
Can we save ourselves, or do we rely on others to do it? Is what we believe always the truth?

One moment June Nealon was happily looking forward to years full of laughter and adventure with her family, and the next, she was staring into a future that was as empty as her heart. Now her life is a waiting game. Waiting for time to heal her wounds, waiting for justice. In short, waiting for a miracle to happen.

For Shay Bourne, life holds no more surprises. The world has given him nothing, and he has nothing to offer the world. In a heartbeat, though, something happens that changes everything for him. Now, he has one last chance for salvation, and it lies with June's eleven-year-old daughter, Claire. But between Shay and Claire stretches an ocean of bitter regrets, past crimes, and the rage of a mother who has lost her child.

Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish?

Once again, Jodi Picoult mesmerizes and enthralls readers with this story of redemption, justice, and love. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—May 19, 1966
• Where—Nesconset (Long Island), New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.Ed., Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Hanover, New Hampshire


Jodi Lynn Picoult is an American author. She was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for fiction in 2003. Picoult currently has approximately 14 million copies of her books in print worldwide.

Early life and education
Picoult was born and raised in Nesconset on Long Island in New York State; when she was 13, her family moved to New Hampshire. Even as a child, Picoult had a penchant for writing stories: she wrote her first story— "The Lobster Which Misunderstood"—when she was five.

While still in college—she studied writing at Princeton University—Picoult published two short stories in Seventeen magazine. To pay the bills, after graduation she worked at a variety of jobs, including copy writing and editing textbooks; she even taught eighth-grade English and attained a Masters in Education from Harvard University.

In 1989, Picoult married Timothy Warren Van Leer, whom she met in college, and while pregnant with their first child, wrote her first book. Song of the Humpbacked Whale, her literary debut, came out in 1992. Two more children followed, as did a string of bestseller novels. All told, Picoult has more than 20 books to her name.

Writing
At an earlier time in her life, Picoult believed the tranquility of family life in small-town New England offered little fodder for writing; the truly interesting stuff of fiction happened elsewhere. Ironically, it is small-town life that has ended up providing the settings for Picoult's novels. Within the cozy surroundings of family and friends, Picoult weaves complex webs of relationships that strain, even tear apart, under stress. She excels at portraying ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Disoriented by some accident of chance, they stumble, whirl, and attempt to regain a footing in what was once their calm, ordered world.

Nor has Picoult ever shied from tackling difficult, controversial issues: school shooting, domestic violence, sexual abuse, teen suicide, and racism. She approaches painful topics with sympathy—and her characters with respect—while shining a light on individual struggles. Her legions of readers have loved and rewarded her for that compassion—and her novels have been consistent bestsellers.

Personal life
Picoult and her husband Timothy live in Hanover, New Hampshire. They have three children and a handful of pets. (Adapted from a 2003 Barnes and Noble interview and from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2016.)

Book Reviews
Picoult is a rare writer who delivers book after book, a winning combination of the literary and the commercial.
Entertainment Weekly


Picoult moves the story along with lively debates about prisoner rights and religion, while plumbing the depths of mother-daughter relationships and examining the literal and metaphorical meanings of having heart. The point-of-view switches are abrupt, but this is a small flaw in an impressive book.
Publishers Weekly


Noted for her heart-wrenching stories and the complicated humanity of her characters, Picoult continues her successful foray into fiction.... Picoult tackles the most complicated personal and political issues with compassion and clarity, and her fans will want this one. Suitable for all public libraries
Colleen S. Harris - School Library Journal


A convicted murderer who may be a latter-day Messiah wants to donate his heart to the sister of one of his victims, in Picoult's frantic 15th. Picoult specializes in hot-button issues.... Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can't impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop plot.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. The author uses several famous quotations from some of the greatest thinkers in history, including Lewis Carroll, Voltaire, Woody Allen, Mother Teresa, Mark Twain, the Dalai Lama, Bono, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Albert Einstein. What effect do these philosophical tidbits have on the telling of this story? Which one resonated most with you?

2. Discuss the theme of belief in this novel. What does Shay believe, and who believes in him? Apply this same question to Maggie, Michael, and June. Did this story call any of their beliefs into question? Which ones?

3. When Shay is moved to the I-tier, some very strange things start happening—water turns to wine, Calloway's pet robin is brought back to life, a tiny piece of gum becomes enough for all to share. Some call these miracles while others call them hijinks. What do you make of these incidents? Were you convinced that Shay had divine powers, and if so, at what point did you make that conclusion?

4. Michael tells Maggie that "there's a big difference between mercy and salvation" (142). What is that difference? Which characters are pursuing mercy and which are pursuing salvation? Which, do you think, is granted in the end for each of the main characters?

5. Having lost a daughter and two husbands, June's life is fraught with grief. How do you see that grief shaping her character and informing the choices that she makes? Do you think she makes choices in order to reconcile the past or in hopes of a better future?

6. How do the three religions referenced in this book (Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism) imagine the presence or reappearance of the divine? Compare Michael's vision on p. 71 with Rabbi Bloom's explanation of the Jewish Midrash on p. 96 and Shay's depiction of heaven on p.106.

7. Consider the passage on p.165 where Maggie thinks "the penitentiary [Shay] was referring to was his own body." In what ways are some of the other characters in this book (Claire, Maggie, Lucius) imprisoned by their bodies?

8. Discuss June's questions on p. 184: "Would you give up your vengeance against someone you hate if it meant saving someone you love? Would you want your dreams to come true if it meant granting your enemy's dying wish?" How do the characters answer this question?

9. June thinks that if Claire accepted a heart transplant from Shay Bourne and had to absorb the emotional pain of her father's and sister's murders, it would be "better to have no heart at all" (238). This statement eerily echoes Shay's own statement to June that her first daughter, Elizabeth, "was better off dead." How do you feel about the adults in this novel making such grave choices over the life of a child? Do you feel like they are being protective or presumptuous?

10. Why do you think Shay never puts up a real fight for his innocence? Do you believe he is resigned to his fate or is an active participant in choosing it? Has he made the ultimate sacrifice or is he just trying to make the most out of circumstances beyond his control?

11. Does Change of Heart have a hero? If so, who is it?

12. In Change of Heart, religion seems at times to bring characters together and at others to drive a wedge between them. Ultimately, do you think religion unites people or divides them?
(All questions issued by publisher.)

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Changing Spaces 
Nancy King, 2014
Plain View Press
260 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781891386435


Summary
What would you do if you woke up in your usual life, and by evening, the world as you'd known it was irrevocably changed?

Join runaway wife, Laura Feldman, as she hits the road after the love of her life—her husband of 40 years—suddenly wants a divorce to be with a younger woman. Along the bumpy road to reconnecting her disconnected self, this Midwestern wife finds a new life in the bold colors and close friendships of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Unbeknownst to her, Laura's husband is in hot pursuit while she gets a crash course in assertiveness and an unforgettable "makeover."

When her husband finally catches up with Laura, that's when the real fun begins. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.S., State University of New York;
   M.A., Universityof Delaware; Ph.D., Union
   Institute and University
• Currently—lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico


Nancy King, Ph.D is the award-winning author of several novels including Changing Spaces, The Stones Speak (which was optioned for a film), Morning Light, A Woman Walking, and the non-fiction Dancing with Wonder: Self-Discovery through Stories.

She frequently writes for the online travel journal, Your Life Is A Trip. Dr. King has extensive experience teaching in universities in Delaware and New Mexico (Honors Programs [Theatre, Creativity and World Literature], and currently conducts arts-based workshops internationally. She finds inspiration in weaving and hiking in the mountains of Santa Fe, New Mexico where she makes her home. (From the publisher.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Nancy King on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Location. Location. Location. Nancy King gets it right when she explores how a woman radically changes her life by changing her location. A plant can't thrive in any old soil; it has to be the right terrain. Changing Spaces is a reminder that one can leave the past behind, find new soil, and thrive in a different, and better, present and future. A page turner...You feel like the proverbial fly on the adobe wall when you see how Laura learns the power of female friendship.
Judith Fein, author (Life Is a Trip and The Spoon from Minkowitz)


Heartbreak turns to intrigue. A season of grief leads to a wig, a closet, a script, cookie recipes, new friendships, and a wide-open future.
Jeanne Murray Walker, author (Geography of Memory)


Nancy King guides Laura with a steady hand in this engaging tale of loss and empowerment to which many readers will surely relate.
Kate Buckley, author (Choices)


A deeply felt and powerfully experienced tale...”
Gwen Davis, author (The Pretenders)


Not since Marilyn French's 70s novel, The Women's Room, has there been such a groundbreaking novel...As Laura takes on Bed & Breakfast duties in Santa Fe, and frees her spirit in the natural beauty of New Mexico, we want her to succeed. But how will she solve that dilemma that was presented so succinctly in Muriel's Wedding when Muriel says, "I can change..." and her mean-girl friends sniff, "You'll still be YOU"? How Laura solves this dilemma is deliciously amusing as she learns how to take on a new "persona" through theater techniques that lead to fresh assertiveness.
Dancing in the Experience Lane Book Review Blog

Discussion Questions
1. On the morning Laura’s husband Zach plans to leave her, his contradictory behavior tips her off that something is amiss. What are the clues? If their roles were reversed, do you think Zach would have noticed Laura’s behavioral changes?

2. When Laura woke up, her husband made love to her, and that afternoon, he told her that he wanted a divorce. How did you react to this contradictory behavior?

3. How would you describe Zach’s actions and his point of view? Have you ever thought your mind was made up about a major life change, but then had second thoughts?

4. What do you think about Laura’s actions in the midst of her grief and confusion? In your experience, has acting on impulse had good results?

5. Who do you think has more post-divorce options: a man or a woman? If they are both in their sixties, would that fact affect their chances for happiness?

6. How would a different era have affected this story? Could Laura have made a similar life transition in the 1900s or the 1950s?

7. Were there any characters you disliked or felt sorry for?

8. When Laura meets Bountiful Sunshine, what is her reaction? Have you ever felt drawn to someone because of their style? How would you describe yourself?

9. Who and what empowers Laura along her journey?

10. What do you think this book is saying about friendships with women? Do you agree or disagree?

11. What was your reaction to Laura’s decision to help run the Bed & Breakfast?

12. Have you ever been to New Mexico or Santa Fe, or do you live there now? If yes, How accurate do you think the descriptions of terrain, people and culture are? If no, does this story make you want to go there?

13. Do you agree that changing location can bring about renewal and healing, or is it better to stay closer to your roots and familiar territory in times of trouble?

14. What do you think the author is saying about how men and women relate?

15. What do you think of Laura’s “makeover”? If you wanted to change something about yourself, what role model would you choose? Have you ever “tried out” another personality? If yes, how did it make you feel? How did people react?

16. What was your reaction when Zach shows up and encounters Laura’s “new” identity? Have you ever encountered an old friend whom you failed to  recognize?

17. Imagine the lives of the characters after the novel. How do they unfold?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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The Chaperone
Laura Moriarty, 2012
Penguin Group USA
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487019


Summary
The Chaperoneis a captivating novel about the woman who chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 and the summer that would change them both.

Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star and an icon of her generation, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York. Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither mother nor friend. Cora Carlisle, a complicated but traditional woman with her own reasons for making the trip, has no idea what she’s in for. Young Louise, already stunningly beautiful and sporting her famous black bob with blunt bangs, is known for her arrogance and her lack of respect for convention. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever.

For Cora, the city holds the promise of discovery that might answer the question at the core of her being, and even as she does her best to watch over Louise in this strange and bustling place she embarks on a mission of her own. And while what she finds isn’t what she anticipated, she is liberated in a way she could not have imagined. Over the course of Cora’s relationship with Louise, her eyes are opened to the promise of the twentieth century and a new understanding of the possibilities for being fully alive.

Drawing on the rich history of the 1920s,’30s, and beyond—from the orphan trains to Prohibition, flappers, and the onset of the Great Depression to the burgeoning movement for equal rights and new opportunities for women—Laura Moriarty’s The Chaperone illustrates how rapidly everything, from fashion and hemlines to values and attitudes, was changing at this time and what a vast difference it all made for Louise Brooks, Cora Carlisle, and others like them. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—December 24, 1970
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.S.W. and M.A., University of Kansas
• Currently—Lives in Lawrence, Kansas


Laura Moriarty received her master’s degree from the University of Kansas, and was awarded the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. She lives in Maine. (From the publisher.) The Center of Everything is Moriarty's first novel. Her second, The Rest of her Life, was published in 2007, While I'm Falling in 2009, and The Chaperone in 2012.

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• There are other Laura Moriartys I shouldn't be confused with: Laura Moriarty the poet, and Laura Moriarty the crime writer. If it helps, I'm Laura Eugenia Moriarty, though I've never used my middle name professionally.

• I got my first job when I was sixteen, cooking burgers at McDonald's. I've been a vegetarian since I was ten, so it was a little hard on me. I'm also technically inept and kind of dreamy, so I frustrated the guy who worked the toaster to the point where he threatened to strangle me on a daily basis. I kept that job for two years. I gave Evelyn a job at McDonald's too, and I made her similarly unsuccessful.

• Another job I was really bad at was tending bar. I was an exchange student at the University of Malta about ten years ago. I thought I wanted to go to medical school, so I signed up to take all these organic chemistry and physiology classes. In Malta. It was terrible. The Maltese students were into chemistry. I had a lab partner named Ester Carbone. There was a rumor my instructor had his house built in the shape of a benzene molecule. I couldn't keep up. I dropped out in February, and I needed money. Malta has pretty strict employment laws, and the only job I could get was an illegal one, working at a bar. I don't know anything about mixed drinks, and I don't speak Maltese. I think I was supposed to stand behind the bar be American and female and smile, but I ended up squinting at people a lot, so eventually, I was in the back, doing dishes. That was the year I started writing.

• The Center of Everything has a few autobiographical moments, but not many. I grew up with three sisters in Montana. When you say you're from Montana, people get this wistful look in their eyes. I think they've seen too many Brad Pitt movies. I saw A River Runs Through It, which is set in my hometown, Bozeman. That movie drove me nuts: I don't think anyone is even wearing coat in the whole movie. They can't keep filming up there in August and tricking everyone. Of course, now I live in Maine.

• I have tender hands, and the worst thing in the world, for me, is going to an event that requires a lot of hand shaking. Some people shake nicely, but some people have a death grip, and it's really painful. The thing is, you can't tell who's going to be a death gripper and who isn't. Big, strapping men have shaken my hand gently, but an elderly woman I met last month almost brought me to my knees. She was smiling the whole time. I went to a hand shaking event a month ago, and I went along with the shaking, because I didn't want to look rude or standoffish or freaky about germs. But hand shaking just kills me. I'm not sure what to do about it. I went back to Phillips Exeter a month ago, and a very polite student reintroduced himself to me and extended his hand to shake. I actually tried to high five him. He looked at me like I was a crazy person. My sister told me I should take a cue from Bob Dole and carry a pen in my right hand all the time, so I might try that.

• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:

It's difficult to pick just one, of course. But I will say that while I was writing The Center of Everything, I read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World, and it made a strong impression on me. I only knew about Sagan from watching the Nova Channel when I was a kid, but I happened upon an essay he'd written before he died. I was so impressed I went to the library and checked out some of his books. In The Demon Haunted World, Sagan stresses the importance of skepticism and rational reasoning when considering the mysteries of the universe.

It's easy for us today to see the insanity of the witchcraft trials, but Sagan gives a sympathetic account of how frightening the world must have seemed in those times, and how quickly our ability to reason can be dismissed in the face of fear and superstition. Today, Sagan points out, we have crop circles, alien abductions, and religious fundamentalism; the book has a great chapter called "The Baloney Detection Kit," an important tool for any open-minded skeptic. What I like most about Sagan is that he seems skeptical without coming across as cynical. He looks at the vastness of the universe and the intricacy of the natural world with so much wonder and awe, and he's able to translate it to a reader who isn't a scientist, such as myself. I also noticed how he refrains from making fun or putting down his opponents; there's such a generosity of spirit in his writing. I tried to put a bit of Sagan in Evelyn, the narrator of The Center of Everything. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.).

Book Reviews
Throughout The Chaperone, her fourth and best novel, Laura Moriarty mines first-rate fiction from the tension between a corrupting coastal media and the ideal of heart-of-America morality. . . . . Brooks's may be the novel's marquee name, but the story's heart is Cora's. With much sharpness but great empathy, Moriarty lays bare the settled mindset of this stolid, somewhat fearful woman—and the new experiences that shake that mindset up.
San Francisco Weekly


Film star Louise Brooks was a legend in her time, but the real lead of The Chaperone is Cora Carlise, Brooks' 36-year-old chaperone for her first visit to New York City in 1922. As Cora struggles to tame Louise's free spirit, she finds herself moving past the safety of her own personal boundaries. In this fictional account of Cora and Louise's off-and-on relationship, Laura Moriarty writes with grace and compassion about life's infinite possibilities for change and, ultimately, happiness.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


The Chaperone is the enthralling story of two women...and how their unlikely relationship changed their lives.... In this layered and inventive story, Moriarty raises profound questions about family, sexuality, history, and whether it is luck or will—or a sturdy combination of the two—that makes for a wonderful life.
Oprah Magazine


In her new novel, The Chaperone, Laura Morirty treats this golden age with an evocative look at the early life of silent-film icon Louise Brooks, who in 1922 leaves Wichita, Kansas, for New York City in the company of 36-year-old chaperone, Cora Carlisle... A mesmerizing take on women in this pivotal era.
Vogue


With her shiny black bob and milky skin, Louise Brooks epitomized silent-film glamour. But in Laura Moriarty's engaging new novel The Chaperone, Brooks is just a hyper-precocious and bratty 15-year-old, and our protagonist, 36-year-old Cora Carlisle, has the not-easy mission of keeping the teenager virtuous while on a trip from their native Kansas to New York City. After a battle of wills, there's a sudden change of destiny for both women, with surprising and poignant results.
Entertainment Weekly


With her bobbed black hair and strikingly red lipstick, Louise Brooks was a femme fatale in early Hollywood movies. In this latest novel from Moriarty (The Center of Everything), a teenage Louise heads to New York City in 1922 from her home in Wichita, chaperoned by proper Kansas matron Cora Carlisle. Once in New York, Louise is accepted by the renowned Denishawn School of Dancing and is on her way to fame. An innocent young adult she is not—hard as nails, she is both self-promoting and self-destructive. The real story here, however, is about Cora, a kind soul despite the shocks she has endured at several crucial times in her life. Cora's visit to New York gives her a new perspective and changes her life in unexpected ways. The novel, which spans the next six decades of Cora's life, also reminds us how dramatically American life changed over the 20th century. Verdict: Moriarty is a wonderful storyteller; it's hard to put this engaging novel down. Fans of the Jazz Age and sweeping historical fiction will likely feel the same way. —Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA
Library Journal


The challenges of historical fiction are plentiful—how to freely imagine a person who really lived, how to impart modern sensibility to a bygone era, how to do your research without exactly showing your research. And yet, when this feat is achieved artfully (we’re talking Loving Frank or Arthur and George artfully), it can transport a reader to another time and place. Laura Moriarty’s new novel, The Chaperone, falls into this category.
Bookpage


[Moriarty] imagines the life of the actual Wichita matron who accompanied future silent film star Louise Brooks to New York City in 1922 as a favor to Brooks' parents. Although Louise Brooks was a larger-than-life personality whose memoir LuLu in Hollywood is held in high critical esteem, she's given short shrift by Moriarty, whose interest lies in Cora Carlisle.... Cora seems to represent the history of women's rights in the 20th century. An early suffragette, she applauds the end of prohibition and champions birth control and racial equality. She also gives Louise good advice during a rocky period in her career. Unlike the too-infrequently-seen Louise, the fictional characters seem less alive or important than the issues they represent.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Chaperone opens with Cora Carlisle waiting out a rainstorm in a car with a friend when she hears about Louise Brooks for the first time. What do we learn about Cora in this scene? What does it tell us about her and the world she lives in? Why does Laura Moriarty, the author, choose to open the novel this way? Why do you think she waits to introduce us to Brooks?

2. When we first meet Louise Brooks, she seems to be the complete opposite of Cora, but the two women form an unlikely bond anyway. Are they really so dissimilar? What does Cora learn from Louise? Do you think Louise learns anything from Cora?

3. When Cora arrives in New York, the city is worlds away from her life in Wichita. How much do you think Cora actually embraces New York? When she returns to Wichita, what does she bring back with her from New York? What parts of her stayed true to Wichita all along?

4. The limits of acceptable behavior for women were rapidly changing in the 1920s, and both Cora Carlisle and Louise Brooks, in their own ways, push against these boundaries. Discuss the different ways the two women try to change society’s expectations for women. Is one more successful than the other? What are the values involved in each woman’s approach?

5. Cora becomes frustrated with the hypocrisy of the women in her Wichita circle of friends and yet she herself chooses to keep details about her own life secret. Do you think she should be more open about her life choices? What are the risks for her if she were to be more open?

6. Cora Carlisle hopes to find the secret of her past in New York City but discovers that the truth doesn’t align with either her expectations or her memory of the past. Why do you think Laura Moriarty has chosen to leave Cora’s history ambiguous? What does this tell you about Cora? How has Cora’s attitude toward her past changed by the end of The Chaperone?

7. Cora narrates the events of the book from a perspective of many years later. What juxtapositions does this allow her? By placing Cora’s narration at a time of radical social change, what parallels is Moriarty making?

8, Think about Louise Brooks’s behavior. How much of it would be considered scandalous today? What values has society held on to? In what ways has society changed?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The Charm Bracelet 
Viola Shipman, 2016
St. Martin's Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250071330


Summary
Through an heirloom charm bracelet, three women will rediscover the importance of family and a passion for living as each charm changes their lives.

On her birthday each year, Lolly’s mother gave her a charm, along with the advice that there is nothing more important than keeping family memories alive, and so Lolly’s charm bracelet would be a constant reminder of that love.

Now seventy and starting to forget things, Lolly knows time is running out to reconnect with a daughter and granddaughter whose lives have become too busy for Lolly or her family stories.

But when Arden, Lolly’s daughter, receives an unexpected phone call about her mother, she and granddaughter Lauren rush home. Over the course of their visit, Lolly reveals the story behind each charm on her bracelet, and one by one the family stories help Lolly, Arden, and Lauren reconnect in a way that brings each woman closer to finding joy, love, and faith.

A compelling story of three women and a beautiful reminder of the preciousness of family, The Charm Bracelet is a keepsake you’ll cherish long after the final page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• AKA—Wade Rouse
• Birth—1956
• Where—Granby, Missouri, USA
• Education—B.A., Drury University; M.S., Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in the state of Michigan


Viola Shipman is a penname for Wade Rouse, a popular, award-winning memoirist. Rouse chose his grandmother’s name, Viola Shipman, to honor the woman whose charm bracelet and family stories inspired him to write his debut novel, which is a tribute to all of our elders.

Writing as Wade Rouse, he has penned several memoirs, including America's Boy; At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream; Confessions of A Prep School Mommy Handler; and It's All Relative.

He has written two novels as Viola Shipman, The Hope Chest (2017) and The Charm Bracelet (2016), as well as a novella, Christmas Angels (2016, e-book only).

Wade's work has been selected multiple times as a Must-Read by NBC’s Today Show, featured on Chelsea Lately on E!, and been chosen three times by the nation's independent booksellers as an Indie Next Pick.

Rouse lives in Michigan and writes regularly for People and Coastal Living, among other places, and is a contributor to All Things Considered. To date, The Charm Bracelet has been translated into nine languages. (Adapted from the publisher and the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Readers will be charmed by the characters, most of all by kooky but wise Lolly, who teaches her stressed-out daughter and granddaughter lessons in life and love.
Good Housekeeping


Shipman’s debut novel unites three generations of women as they come together to heal the wounds of their pasts and forge a family.…Shipman compellingly depicts the bonds of family, revealing that the moments of trials and tribulation are part of lives filled with hope and faith.
Publishers Weekly


Shipman's charming story of finding peace in oneself, listening to your heart, and remembering all those who came before you will be welcomed by fans of Cecelia Ahern and Debbie Macomber. —Melissa Keegan, Ela Area P.L., Lake Zurich, IL
Library Journal


[Shipman] pulls out all the emotional bells and whistles here; book reads like a fictionalized guide to living the good life…designed to warm the heart and fill the tear ducts. Smooth writing, unabashed sentimentality: if it sometimes feels a little forced or relentless, where's the harm?
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. The Charm Bracelet was written as a tribute to the author’s grandmothers—whose charm bracelets and lessons inspired the novel — as well as to all of our elders. Do you think we respect our elders—their lives, stories, and sacrifices — as much as we used to in the past? Why or why not? Talk about specific instances in the book where Lauren and Arden honored Lolly. Discuss instances in your life or the lives of others when elders haven’t been shown the respect they deserve.

2. The Charm Bracelet focuses on the lives and relationships of three generations of women in one family. Do you see parallels between Lolly, Arden, and Lauren and your own family? Discuss how the decisions and choices you’ve made — or those made by your mother, grandmother, or daughter — have affected your family, either positively or negatively.

3. Do you have a charm bracelet? Do you collect charms? Do you have charms from your family? Discuss where you got some of them and what they mean to you. Do you collect any other heirloom items? What are they and what stories do they tell/memories do they provide? What other collections do you have from your family (dishes, hope chest, recipes, etc.)? What do they mean to you? Will you pass them on to your daughters or granddaughters? And were any of these traditions that were started by your grandmother or a female family figure?

4. There are many examples of love that Lolly, Arden, and Lauren exemplify in The Charm Bracelet: Familial love, lost love, new love, love of place, love of work, and love of home. Discuss those. What is your greatest “love” and why? Do you have any love regrets?

5. The Charm Bracelet was inspired by the stories — the oral history — of the author’s grandmothers and family. In numerous passages, Lolly tells Arden to put down her phone, or for Lauren to stop texting and call a friend instead. In addition, Arden’s career seems to spotlight our societal thirst for celebrity gossip and instant news. In contrast, Lolly tells stories via the charms of the family’s history, generational tales that would be lost if she didn’t share them. Do you think we are losing our collective family “heirloom” histories (i.e., that of telling family stories, sharing our family heirlooms)? If so, what will be the consequences to future generations? If not, why? And what are you doing to preserve those traditions?

6. If there was one story or lesson from your life that you could share with a younger family member — a child, a grandchild, a niece or nephew, or a cousin — what would it be? What story or stories do you want to be sure to share and pass along in your life? And with whom?

7. If you had a chance to ask a grandparent or elder something about his or her life, what would it be?

8. Arden desires to be a writer, while Lauren wants to be a painter. Neither are easy, stable career paths. Have you ever given up pursuing a passion because “life” got in the way or because it didn’t seem logical? How did that impact you, and does it still? Do you think most of us are ruled by fear in our lives? Or is that “just life”? Talk about a job that you stayed at — but didn’t like — because you felt you had no other options.

9. The Charm Bracelet seeks to remind readers of what’s truly most important in life in these hectic — often troubling — times: Family, faith, friends, fun, and a passion for life and what you do. Do you think in our busy world today that we have forgotten what’s most important? Why or why not? And how do you and your family try to focus on reminding yourselves of those simple yet grand gifts (i.e., Sunday dinners, no cell phones at dinner, family trips to the same place, etc.)?

10. Has anyone in your family or life been diagnosed with dementia? Discuss how that has impacted them, you, and your life.

11. Do you and your family — and those in your book club — have a special place that you return to every year? Discuss what that place means to you.

12. There is a contrast in The Charm Bracelet that is drawn between life in an urban area and life in a more rural/resort area. What are the pros and cons of both?

13. Lolly, Arden, and Lauren are all strong, independent women and characters. Talk about some of the strong, independent women in your life and what they mean/have meant to you. And discuss how women are portrayed today not only in fiction but also in the media.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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Charming Billy
Alice McDermott, 1998
Macmillan Picador
243 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312429423


Summary
Winner, 1998 National Book Award
Winner, 1999 American Book Award

Resonant with the voices of its voluble, bereaved characters and fueled by the twin engines of nostalgia and lost love, Alice McDermott's National Book Award-winning Charming Billy is the story of the life and tragic death of the much-loved Billy Lynch.

At the heart of McDermott's novel is the revelation that the torch Billy carried for his long-dead love is predicated upon a lie: Eva, the Irish girl Billy loved in his youth and long believed dead, is actually alive, married, and living in Ireland. (Unable to tell Billy that Eva had left him for another man, his cousin Dennis instead invented the face-saving story of her untimely death.)

Thus the central debate of the novel is set in motion: Was it the knowledge of Eva's betrayal or the discovery of Dennis's 30-year-old lie that killed Billy? Or was his death simply due to a genetic weakness for alcohol? Whatever the reason, observes Dennis's daughter (the narrator of the novel), of one thing there is no doubt: Billy had "ripped apart, plowed through, as alcoholics tend to do, the great deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room."

Fierce, witty, and haunting, Alice McDermott's poignant evocation of postwar Irish American immigrant life is a masterpiece about the unbreakable bonds of memory and desire. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1953
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York-Oswego;
   M.A., University of New Hampshire
• Awards—National Book Award; American Book Award
• Currently—lives in Bethesda, Maryland


Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975. She received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978.

She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker and Seventeen. She has also published articles in the New York Times and Washington Post.

Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.

Works
• 1982—A Bigamist's Daughter
• 1987—That Night (finalist for National Book Award, Pen/Faulkner Award, and Pulitzer Prize)
• 1992—At Weddings and Wakes (finalist for Pulitzer Prize)
• 1998—Charming Billy (winner, National Book Award and American Book Award)
• 2002—Child of My Heart (nominated for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)
• 2006—After This (finalist for Pulitzer Prize)
• 2013—Someone
• 2017—The Ninth Hour
(Author bio from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/14/13.)

Book Reviews
Magical…Ms. McDermott's people, unlike so many character's in contemporary American fiction, are defined largely by their relationships to other family members, relationships that are delineated with unusual understanding of how emotional debts and gifts are handed down, generation to generation, and how that legacy creates a sense of continuity and continuance, a hedge against the erasures of time. In Charming Billy Ms. McDermott writes about such matters with wisdom and grace, refusing to sentimentalize her characters even as she forces us to recognize their decency and goodness. She has written a luminous and affecting novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Charming Billy is a remarkable and beautifully told novel, with overlays of prose and insight that are simply luminescent.
Gail Caldwell - Boston Sunday Globe


An astoundingly beautiful novel about the persistence of love, the perseverance of grief, and all-but-unbearable loneliness, as well as faith, loyalty and redemption.
Philadelphia Inquirer


Comes close to being a perfect miniature…It is an exceptionally good novel.
Jonathan Yardley - Washington Post


You get no blarney from Alice McDermott's novels. What you get is Irish-American angst—straight up, no chaser. You get probing family archeology, burnished prose and minimalist, backward-arching plots as her characters sift through battered memories for faint signs of redemption.

McDermott's latest, Charming Billy, circles repeatedly and tantalizingly around the ghostly form of Billy Lynch, the late sentimentalist, chatty raconteur, writer of sweet letters and drunk extraordinaire whose wake is the occasion for a chorus of reminiscing relatives and friends. Set in New York City's outer boroughs and Long Island from the '40s through the '80s, the novel is an exquisite portrayal of dream and delusion, the limits of community and, most pointedly, the cruel narcissism behind the alcoholic's grin.

By the end, we still hardly know Billy, but we understand all too well the havoc he has wrought. Especially for his long-suffering wife, Maeve, and guilt-ridden cousin, Dennis, whose well-meant lie may have wounded (but not cursed) Billy's already-doomed soul. Pain is said to have driven him to drink, the pain of learning that Eva, the Irish girl he fell for just after World War II, had died of pneumonia. In fact she hadn't died but jilted him to marry her Irish boyfriend—and for years only Dennis knew. Maeve is Billy's plain consolation for losing pretty Eva, and Billy is a fitting partner for a daughter accustomed to tending to an alcoholic, widowed father.

As in Weddings and Wakes, McDermott's previous novel, an extended family serves as protagonist. The Lynches wring their hands, tell funny stories, debate whether alcoholism is a disease or a failure of will. Most of them are people of limited means who make do with boring jobs. To move from cramped apartment to modest house is a milestone only a few achieve. (A tiny vacation cottage in an unfashionable area of the Hamptons represents both what they feel entitled to and what is beyond reach.) And for believer and apostate alike, the Catholic Church provides the primary life-defining narrative.

McDermott fashions her story out of an accumulation of hints and evasions, secrets and lies. Emotions are closeted, muffled, purged. There are no explosive confrontations, no charged recriminations. Yet the drama is enormous, arising from the tension of what isn't said. Billy, an innocent who couldn't fathom that life is neither poetry nor prayer, is the silent center of a superbly crafted novel.
Dan Cryer - Salon


When Billy, the glue of a tight Irish community in New York, dies as a result of lifelong alcohol abuse, mourners gather around roast beef and green bean amandine to tell tales and ruminate on his struggle for happiness after he lost his first love, Eva. With carefully drawn character studies and gentle probing, McDermott, who won the National Book Award for this work, masterfully weaves a subtle but tenacious web of relationships to explore the devastation of alcoholism, the loss of innocence, the daily practice of love, and the redeeming unity of family and friendship.
Library Journal

Discussion Questions
1. If Billy's wife had been beautiful, observes the narrator, "then the story of his life, or the story they would begin to re-create for him this afternoon, would have to take another turn" (p. 3). What is the accepted story of Billy's life as presented by the mourners assembled at the funeral lunch? Which aspects of that story turn out to be false?

2. Rosemary says that Billy's alcoholism was "a disease" (p. 19): Dan Lynch says that "maybe for some people it's a disease . . . Maybe for some it's a sadness they can't get rid of or a disappointment that won't go away . .. They're loyal to their own feelings" (pp. 20-21). Dennis says that "an alcoholic can always find a reason but never needs one" (p. 35). When it comes to Billy, which of them is right?

3. When Dennis decides to tell Billy that Eva is dead, he thinks, "Better he be brokenhearted than trailed all the rest of his life by a sense of his own foolishness" (p. 31). Does Dennis come to change his mind later in life, to regret having told a lie? What other lies does Dennis tell Billy, and what illusions does he allow Billy to entertain?

4. Dennis says, "When Billy sets his heart on something there's no changing him. He's loyal. He's got this faith--which is probably why he drinks" (pp. 35-36). Why does Dennis link drinking with faith? What does Dennis mean when he says Billy has faith? Is this faith connected with religious faith? "Redemption" is a favorite word of Billy's (p. 187). What does it mean to him? What does the narrator mean when she contrasts Billy's type of faith with Dennis's (p. 242)?

5. What does the demeanor of the priest who visits Maeve and the way the assembled mourners react tohim tell us about the author's attitude toward the Church and its dogmas about life and death? What are Billy's feelings toward these dogmas? What are Dennis's, and what about the narrator's?

6. Why does Billy love the sight of the large houses in East Hampton, and what does that say about his character and circumstances? What class attitudes are held in common by this large extended family? Kate feels she has escaped her working-class background. Has she really? In what ways has she taken on the characteristics of the upper middle class, and in what ways is she rooted in her origins?

7. Dennis says of Billy, "It's hard to be a liar and a believer yourself" (p. 36). What does he mean by this?

8. In what ways have the life experiences of Dennis's mother, Sheila, helped to form her character? What is her real opinion of both her husbands? When the narrator says that Sheila's first husband "had been, without question, Holy Father to the entire clan" (p. 97), what is she implying?

9. Dennis seems, on the surface, to be an easygoing and simple man. What events show him to be a far more complex and sophisticated person than he might appear? How would you describe Dennis? How does his character contrast with Billy's?

10. The narrator says that regarding Maeve's relationship with her elderly father, hers "was not an unusual case . . . It was, I suppose, the very image I'd fought against myself" (p. 132). But times have changed, "self-sacrifice having been recognized as a delusion by then, not a virtue. Self-consciousness more the vogue" (p. 132). In what other ways have manners and mores noticeably changed in the years between Dennis's youth and his daughter's?

11. Dorothy says that Billy was "maybe too sensitive for this world, if you know what I mean" (p. 168). Do you agree with her?

12. What does Billy's conversation with Eva at the Clonmel gas station tell the reader about Eva's character? Do you think that Billy gets the same message—in other words, does he leave Ireland with a realistic picture of who and what she is?

13. Why does Billy write the message "Beautiful friend" (p. 232) to Maeve after his return from Ireland? Does it mean that he has begun to love and appreciate her for herself, without the ideal of Eva to compare her with? If so, why does his drinking intensify?

14. Why do you think Dennis marries Maeve after Billy's death? Does this marriage come as a surprise to you?

15. In an interview about one of her earlier novels, Alice McDermott stated: "You don't look at the past just once, and you look at it with the knowledge of the present, which was the future. I like that going over, seeing an event through other events that have occurred since, seeing it again and seeing it in a different way, from a different perspective as time goes on" (Publishers Weekly, March 30, 1992). Is this an accurate way of describing McDermott's narrative technique in Charming Billy? Which, in your opinion, are the key events of the novel, and from how many different angles and points of view are they described?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Chasing Amanda
Melissa Foster, 2011
Solstice Publishing
378 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780615477527


Summary
Nine years ago, Molly Tanner witnessed a young girl’s abduction in the busy city of Philadelphia, shifting her occasional clairvoyance into overdrive. Two days later, the girl’s body was found, and Molly’s life fell apart.

Consumed by guilt for not acting upon her visions, and on the brink of losing her family, Molly escaped the torturous reminders in the city, fleeing to the safety of the close-knit rural community of Boyds, Maryland.

Molly’s life is back on track, her son has begun college, and she and her husband have finally rekindled their relationship. Their fresh start is shattered when a seven-year-old girl disappears from a local park near Molly’s home. Unable to turn her back on another child and troubled by memories of the past, Molly sets out to find her, jeopardizing the marriage she’d fought so hard to hold together.

While unearthing clues and struggling to decipher her visions, Molly discovers another side of Boyds, where the residents—and the land itself—hold potentially lethal secrets, and exposes another side of her husband, one that threatens to tear them apart. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
Melissa Foster is the award-winning author of three International bestselling novels, Megan's Way, Chasing Amanda, and Come Back to Me. She has also been published in Indie Chicks, an anthology.

She is the founder of the Women's Nest, a social and support community for women, and the World Literary Cafe (previously WoMen's Literary Cafe), a cross-promotional site for authors, reviewers, bloggers, and readers. Melissa is currently collaborating in the film production of Megan's Way.

Melissa hosts an annual Aspiring Authors contest for children, she's written for Calgary's Child magazine and Women Business Owners magazine, and has painted and donated several murals to The Hospital for Sick Children in Washington, DC. Melissa lives in Maryland with her family. Melissa's interests include her family, reading, writing, painting, friends, helping women see the positive side of life, and visiting Cape Cod. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
A story of madness and mystery that drew me in from the first paragraph...a tale of love, retribution, hope and betrayal...a page turner that will leave you breathless.
Readers Round Table

Foster captures the terror and fear of an abducted child as well as the passion and resolve of the woman who is driven to rescue her before it's too late in this riveting, polished page-turner.
IndieReader.com

Chasing Amanda is a fine psychic thriller, highly recommended.
Midwest Book Review

"[Foster's] newest release captivated me...a subject that is every parent's nightmare. The story had me hooked and shocked. The characters are well written.
Jeanette Stingley - Bella Online

Secrets make this tale outstanding.
Hagerstown Magazine

Foster's writing reminds me of Ted Dekker. The suspense is so strong I'm waiting for the theme music to jump out and scare me as I turn the pages.
The Surrendered Scribe

Discussion Questions
1. Given what was at risk—her marriage, friends, sanity—if you were in Molly's position, would you have continued searching for Tracey? Would you have gone down the tunnels after Cole's ultimatum?

2. Pastor Lett carried with her the burden of living in a small town where her brother had been beaten. Do you think that would have had an impact on her relationship with congregation members, or do you see her as the type of person who would have been able to separate the two? Would you have been able to?

3. Cole was supportive to Molly in many ways, yet he was skeptical of her clairvoyant abilities—maybe rightfully so. How do you feel about the way he treated Molly throughout the book?

4. Tracey experienced Stockholm Syndrome, which became increasingly evident toward the end of the book. As a parent, would you have allowed your daughter to visit the woman who had abducted her given the non-malicious nature of the crime?

5. What are your thoughts on the Boyds Boys, and what should happen them now?

6. Erik was afraid of his ability to have visions, afraid of becoming like Molly had been after Amanda was killed, and yet he was compelled to follow them and try to find Tracey. What support would you offer your own child in that same situation?

7. Did this book make you think differently about parents/children that you see in public
places? Question reasons behind crying children (I hope so!)?
(Questions from author's website.)

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Chasing Windmills 
Catherine Ryan Hyde, 2008
Knopf Doubleday
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307472434


Summary
Letting go becomes the purest expression of love in this extraordinary novel by the bestselling author of Pay It Forward, Catherine Ryan Hyde.

Both Sebastian and Maria live in a world ruled by fear. Sebastian, a lonely seventeen-year-old, is suffocating under his dominant father’s control. In the ten years since his mother passed away, his father has kept him “safe” by barely allowing him out of their apartment. Sebastian’s secret late-night subway rides are rare acts of rebellion. another is a concealed friendship with his neighbor Delilah, who encourages him to question his father’s version of reality. Soon it becomes unclear whether even his mother’s death was a lie.

Maria, a young mother of two, is trying to keep peace at home despite her boyfriend’s abuse. When she loses her job, she avoids telling him by riding the subways during her usual late-night shift. She knows her sister, Stella, is right: She needs to “live in the truth” and let the chips fall where they may. But she still hasn’t been able to bringherself to do it. And soon he will expect her paycheck to arrive.

When Sebastian and Maria wind up on the same train, their eyes meet across the subway car, and these two strangers find a connection that neither can explain or ignore. Together they dream of a new future, agreeing to run away and find Sebastian’s grandmother in the Mojave Desert. But Maria doesn’t know Sebastian is only seventeen. And Sebastian doesn’t know Maria has children until the moment they leave. Ultimately, Maria brings one child, her daughter. Can she really leave her little boy behind? And, if not, what will it cost her to face her furious jilted abuser?

In this tremendously moving novel, Catherine Ryan Hyde shows us how two people trapped by life’s circumstances can break free and find a place in the world where love is genuine and selfless. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—Buffalo, New York, USA
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Cambria, California


Catherine Ryan Hyde is an American novelist and short story writer, with more recent forays and notable success in transitioning from traditional publication towards the world of eBook publication. Her novels have enjoyed bestseller status in both the U.S. and U.K., and her short stories have won many awards and honors. Her book Pay It Forward was adapted into a top-of-the-charts movie, starring Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt.

Ryan-Hyde's literary works are generally optimistic explorations of ordinary people, characters who are troubled or down-on-their-luck or recovering from past difficulties or abuse. Many feature journeys that parallel some of Catherine's own travels, life in New York City, small towns, and 'cross country' travels and explore settings often in those areas and the American West and Southwest. Ryan-Hyde's Young writings and activities deal issues such as alcoholism, (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, TransGender) concerns, social service difficulties, etc. Catherine is also an avid hiker, kayaker, photographer, and is well known for being a very active blogger and interview-accessible author.

Early life

Catherine was born in a family of writers, and lived during her early life in the Buffalo, New York area, and briefly lived in New York City, an influence which has often recurs in her writing in the form of being a setting for part of or the whole story arc. She attributes her changeover from "the last kid picked" on the team towards becoming a writer to a favorite teacher, Lenny Horowitz, who later died of liver cancer.[1] After an accelerated graduation from high school at the age of 17, Catherine worked many jobs such as being a dog trainer, a tour guide at Hearst Castle, and working in a bakery prior to dedicating herself to become a full-time writer in the early 1980s.

After relocating cross country to the Los Angeles area, she currently lives and writes and blogs from her home and areas around Cambria, California.[2]
Early writing career: short stories and novels

Early successes came from writing short stories, at one point racking up more than 122 rejections before being first published,[3] and since then a total of more than 1500 rejections resulting in about 50 published stories.

During this time, Catherine also wrote her first novel(s) Walter's Purple Heart, her first published Novel Funeral for Horses, and an anthology of 18 short stories, Earthquake Weather . A self-described literary writer, her breakthrough novel Pay It Forward (novel) was released in 1999 (Pocket Books) and quickly became a national bestseller, and was later adapted into the film Pay It Forward (Warner Brothers), which was released in 2000.
Pay It Forward

According to published interviews,[4] the genesis of the idea for the novel came when Catherine's car caught fire in what she described as the "bad neighborhood" in which she lived, and two total strangers came to her assistance, then left before she could even thank them.

Since then Pay It Forward, has been translated into twenty languages for publication in more than thirty countries, and was chosen among the Best Books for Young Adults in 2001 by the American Library Association and continues to be among her most popular and requested works. The movie Pay It Forward (Warner Brothers) was released theatrically in 2000, and starred Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt and Haley Joel Osment.

Pay It Forward, Young Reader's Edition was released on August 19, 2014. The new version tells the same story but was extensively revised to be more complimentary to lesson plans, summer reading lists, etc. for students at a middle school grade level, that is, for students at approximately the same age and maturity level as the novel's main protagonist, Trevor McKinney.
Other short stories and writings

Her work has appeared in The Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Sun, Ploughshares,[5] and Glimmer Train. Two of her stories have been honored in the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. She received second place in the 1998 Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Nearly a dozen of her stories have been nominated for Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Award, and The Pushcart Prize.
Online works

    Five Singing Gardeners and One Dead Stranger, nominated for Pushcart Prize
    "Hurricane Laura", Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 2000, pp.721-735

One of the more humorous things Ryan Hyde does involves is The Bet which is a yearly for-fun wager on the Kentucky Derby with other authors. Winners get to pick a creative but odd title for 2nd place, 2nd picks third, etc. through however many authors are entered. Some of these stories are published on Catherine and the other authors' blogs etc. This year Catherine chose California Chrome, who won, so she "escaped" having to write a story this year.
Current writing career

Since the success of Pay It Forward (novel), Catherine has gone on to publish a total of more than 24 novels, and many more short stories, including major YA works such as The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance, Becoming Chloe, and an LGBT /YA Novel Jumpstart the World, which garnered several nominations "shortlist" mentions for awards such as the "Best Read of the Year award at the British Book Awards and as a Lambda Literary Award Finalist in 2011.
Photography

Catherine has been posting digital versions of wildlife in and around Cambria and on many of her travels for many years, including some of her own "pay it forward" style activities. Featured subjects include wildlife, wildflowers, sunsets, and photographs of interesting cloud formations that she refers to as "done by the Cloud Painter". Many of her best photographs are included in a special "coffee table" book of photographs called 365 Days of Gratitude. Amazon Digital Services, Inc. 2014. ASIN B00JPSS208.
Notable activities

She has served on the 1998 fiction fellowship panel of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and on the editorial staff of the Santa Barbara Review and Central Coast Magazine. She teaches workshops at the Santa Barbara,[6] La Jolla, and Central Coast Writers Conferences.

She is founder and past president of the Pay It Forward Foundation.[7] As a professional public speaker she has addressed the National Conference on Education, twice spoken at Cornell University,[8] met with Americorps members at the White House, and shared a dais with Bill Clinton.[9]

Catherine has also given many interviews regarding success as a writer on blogs, radio stations, including short videos online about what it takes to succeed in becoming a published author. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
In the simple and captivating latest from Pay It Forward author Hyde, a chance encounter proves life-changing for two lonely New York City subway riders. Four months shy of 18, Sebastian Mundt has been held a virtual prisoner by his father since his mother died: his father home-schools him and doesn't let him have outside relationships. One night, with his father heavily sedated by his sleeping pill, Sebastian sneaks out to ride the subway and locks eyes with Maria Arquette, a young mother who is caught in an abusive marriage. The two share an instant connection and take to meeting on the subway almost nightly and tentatively planning a future in the California desert town that Sebastian remembers from childhood, where thousands of windmills stretch out across the horizon. Hyde gracefully alternates between Sebastian's and Maria's perspectives with gentle nods to this New York love story's precursors (Maria obsessively watches West Side Story). It is their voices—at once utterly credible and heartbreakingly naïve—that make the book, and while this is being billed as an adult novel, its closest stylistic relative is S.E. Hinton's YA classic The Outsiders.
Publishers Weekly


Seventeen-year-old Sebastian Mundt is homeschooled by his father in New York City. He hadn't seen his mother, now dead, since he was seven. When his father goes to sleep, Sebastian rides the subways, just to get out of the house. On one of his nocturnal subterranean journeys, he encounters 22-year-old Maria Arquette, who takes her own late-night rides to escape her abusive boyfriend, Carl, the father of her two children. A fan of the movie West Side Story (she was named for the lead character), Maria wishes her life could be as romantic. She calls Sebastian Tony, the movie's hero, and imagines a scenario where they run away together. Sebastian wants to get away from his domineering father, perhaps to the windmills he recalls from his brief stay as a child with his grandmother in the California desert. It does sound romantic, but how will Sebastian react to Maria's children? And how will she prevent Carl from finding her? Hyde (Love in the Present Tense ) presents two damaged people who are too young to have withstood all they have yet strong enough to take that first step to something, "somewhere" better. Readers will dream right along with them while realizing that real life (even as portrayed in novels) isn't like the movies. Recommended for public library collections. — Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal


(Adult/High School) Hyde's coming-of-age novel is a reimagining of the classic tale of star-crossed lovers-intentionally reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, but fresh and new as well. Sebastian, 17, and Maria, 24, meet while riding New York's subway trains until the wee hours of the morning. He's a sheltered homeschooler who sneaks out of the apartment after his controlling father takes his nightly sleeping pill. She's a mother of two who's afraid to tell her abusive husband that she's lost her night-shift job. There's also a fairy godmother-Delilah is a wise old woman who introduces Sebastian to the delights of pizza and DVDs and counsels him on love and the ways of the world. Sebastian and Maria alternate as narrators; short chapters make for a page-turning read and the distinct voices are sweet, soul-baring, and honest. Hyde writes evocatively of the visceral nature of first love. Her characters are well developed, and she describes settings (New York City, a cross-country bus trip, the Mojave Desert) economically but effectively. The ending is realistic and satisfying. Chasing Windmills will appeal to teens who enjoy realistic fiction and a good story about relationships. —Sondra VanderPloeg, Tracy Memorial Library, New London, NH
School Library Journal


Hyde chronicles two New Yorkers' efforts to escape their different but equally constricting lives in a sweet tale openly modeled on West Side Story. Alternating chapters between the two main characters, the author begins with Sebastian, a naive 17-year-old who chafes under the domination of his strange, obsessive father. Home schooling prevents him from making friends his own age, and he's almost completely isolated until a doctor's orders give him a chance to escape his stifling apartment for a few hours each day to get fresh air and exercise. Sebastian spends most of his free time with his only friend, Delilah, an older black woman who has rented an apartment to be near her new grandchild. Delilah doesn't just provide companionship, she also gives him permission to start living for himself. Aimlessly riding the subway late at night just to get out of the house, Sebastian sees a young woman who, like him, goes to the end of the line and back. The two feel an instantaneous spark and, despite several miscues, finally manage to connect. Her name is Maria, and she's riding the Lexington Avenue line during the hours she'd normally be working to keep her abusive boyfriend Carl, father of her two children, from discovering that she's lost her job. When she and Sebastian find themselves falling in love, they see a chance to escape from their individual traps. She nicknames him "Tony," so they'll be Tony and Maria, just like in West Side Story. While the two plan, motherless Sebastian makes a devastating discovery that sends him to California to see his grandmother. That journey takes both him and Maria to the edge of a life-changing decision. A gentle tale centering on how people come to grip with their pasts.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. Do you think it is a coincidence or a pattern that Maria, who had an abusive father, then found a man who abused her?

2. This leads us to consider the next generation: might Natalie's life turn out differently through having known Sebastian?

3. Do you think Maria could have found her way out of her abusive relationship without the support of her sister? Does breaking free from abusive control rely heavily on the support of others, and from having someone mirror back a different reality?

4. Similarly, how differently do you think Sebastian's life would have turned out without the support of Delilah?

5. Do you understand the decisions Sebastian's mother made when he was young? Do you forgive her for her actions?

6. In what ways do the themes of this novel match those of West Side Story? Did the novel's nod to this famous story effect your reading of it, and if so, how?

7. In your experience, is there a fine line between love and possession? Can the two be easily confused? What different kinds of love are illustrated in the novel?

8. How are Sebastian and Maria alike and how are they different? If they had met under happier circumstances, do you think they would still have fallen in love?

9. How important are your childhood memories to you? Is there a single memory you feel defines who you are?

10. How did you feel about the way the novel ended? Was it as you expected? Would you have preferred a different outcome?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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