Do Not Become Alarmed
Maile Meloy, 2017
Penguin Publishing Group
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735216525
Summary
From a beloved, award-winning writer, the much-anticipated novel about what happens when two families go on a tropical vacation—and the children go missing.
When Liv and Nora decide to take their families on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. The children—two eleven-year-olds, an eight-year-old, and a six-year-old—love the nonstop buffet and the independence they have at the Kids' Club.
But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor misfortunes leads the families farther and farther from the ship's safety. One minute the children are there, and the next they're gone.
What follows is a riveting, revealing story told from the perspectives of the adults and the children, as the once-happy parents—now turning on one another and blaming themselves—try to recover their children and their lives.
Celebrated for her ability to write vivid, spare, moving fiction, Maile Meloy shows how quickly the life we count on can fall away, and how a crisis changes everyone's priorities.
The fast-paced, gripping plot of Do Not Become Alarmed carries with it an insightful, provocative examination of privilege, race, guilt, envy, the dilemmas of modern parenthood, and the challenge of living up to our own expectations.
(From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 15, 1972
• Where—Helena, Montana, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.F.A., University of California-Irvine
• Awards—PEN/Malmud Award (more below)
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Maile Meloy (pronounced MY-lee) is an Americcan novelist and short story writer. Her novels include Do Not Become Alarmed (2017), A Family Daughter (2006), Liars and Saints (2003). She has published the story collections, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (2009) and Half in Love (2002). Both Ways was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review and one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times.
She has also written a well regarded trilogy for young readers, starting with The Apothecary (2011), a New York Times bestseller and winner of the 2012 E.B. White Award. Next in the series came The Apprentice (2013) and, finally, The After-Room (2017).
Meloy’s short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Short Stories 2015. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Slate, and O.
Recognition
Meloy has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as two California Book Awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists. (Adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website. Retrieved 6/19/2017.)
Book Reviews
[A]n earnest and surprisingly generic children-in-jeopardy novel, one that makes few demands on us and doesn’t deliver much, either…[although] Meloy pokes around in some profound subject matter.… Meloy’s portrait of well-meaning but still ugly Americans resonates.… Near the end of this novel, one of the luckier parents thinks: "He and his family had escaped, leaving chaos behind them. It was the American way."
Dwight Garner - New York Times
[I]t should be a literary event, a big summer book.… [I]t has a strong premise…; it addresses big topics…. Its writing is uniformly excellent. So what happened?… [D]espite these moments, the book is essentially a write-off. To begin with, it’s a thriller without thrills.... Again and again, Do Not Become Alarmed trots out a vague sense of social responsibility, while focusing emotionally on a handful of nervous Americans.
Charles Finch - Washington Post
This is one of those can’t-stop-turning-the-pages novels, which quickly reveals itself to be something more than a page-turner… [Meloy] writes with breathless tension yet lets her characters breathe; you believe these children and their desperate parents, and find yourself utterly entrenched in their fate.
Seattle Times
A taut, nervy thriller.… Meloy has a keenly intuitive ear for family dynamics, first-world privilege, and all the ways that human nature can adapt to the unthinkable.
Entertainment Weekly
A marital reboot becomes a zip line to disaster in Maile Meloy’s holiday cruise-set thriller Do Not Become Alarmed, in which the children’s moral complexity outstrips that of their parents.
Vogue
Nothing pairs better with summer than a suspense that will keep you guessing (especially when it involves a cruise ship). The pulse-inducing unputdownable tale about the disappearance of four children on a family cruise, Do Not Become Alarmed is a powerful suspense that will leave readers asking themselves if family truly keeps us safe.
Redbook
In crafting this high-stakes page-turner, Meloy excels as a master of suspense. Though some of the circumstances seem piled on for the sake of melodrama…, the story is nonetheless engrossing for all its nerve-racking twists and turns.
Publishers Weekly
A taut, gripping thriller…[an] entertaining examination of privileged, modern families.
Library Journal
[A] propulsive drama…infusing literary fiction with criminality and terror.…Meloy compounds the suspense in this gripping and incisive tale by orchestrating a profoundly wrenching shift in perspective…. Meloy’s commanding, heart-revving, and thought-provoking novel has enormous power and appeal.
Booklist
(Starred review.) The plot unfolds with terrifying realism.… This writer can apparently do it all—New Yorker stories, children's books, award-winning literary novels, and now, a tautly plotted and culturally savvy emotional thriller. Do not start this book after dinner or you will almost certainly be up all night.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Do Not Become Alarmed …then take off on your own:
1. What do you think of the characters at the book's onset? Consider all four (or six) of the adults, as well as the children. Do you prefer some over others? Do any of the characters change over the course of the novel? Do your opinions of them change?
2. Talk about the ways in which three of the characters — the autistic, the actor, and the diabetic — require specialized attention and love from Liv and Nora. How do their needs affect the dynamics of the group as a whole? How do they affect the two women?
3. In what ways does the author Maile Meloy (pronounced MY-lee) first begin to ratchet up the sense of peril before the actual disappearance of the children?
4. How does each adult respond/react to the missing children? Are their reactions appropriate? Are they believable (in terms of how actual human beings, rather than fictional characters would react)? What fault lines are exposed in the adults' relationships by the kidnapping?
5. Liv thinks "The karmic bus had mowed her down." What does she mean? In what way does she feel she is being punished for the disaster? What about the other two women?
6. The book deals in serious topics, especially having to do with rich Americans who use the poverty-ridden Latin America as a playground. Does this issue resonate with you? Or do you consider that American tourists offer poorer cultures an economic opportunity?
7. Can/should the children's disappearance be laid at the feet of any of the women? Does their lack of caution border on neglect or carelessness? Or could something like this happen without anyone being "to blame"?
8. A couple of references (hints) are made that the children are too soft and that their parents have not prepared them adequately for the world. Is that criticism or observation fair or not—are these children coddled? Are American children in general overprotected? Or has, say, the media made them smarter or savvier than you were as a child?
9. Have you ever been on a cruise before? Does the author do a good job of portraying the sense of pleasure in which the travelers are enveloped? Has reading Do Not Become Alarmed made you think twice about taking another cruise...or ever taking a first one?
10. What do you make of the book's title? What is its significance?
11. The novel allows different characters to express their point of view. Did you find the shifting perspectives confusing, enriching, distracting …or something else?
12. What was your experience reading the novel? Were you on the seat of your pants? What about the ending—do you find it satisfying?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Lost and Wanted
Nell Freudenberger, 2019
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385352680
Summary
An emotionally engaging, suspenseful new novel, told in the voice of a renowned physicist: an exploration of female friendship, romantic love, and parenthood--bonds that show their power in surprising ways.
Helen Clapp's breakthrough work on five-dimensional spacetime landed her a tenured professorship at MIT; her popular books explain physics in plain terms.
Helen disdains notions of the supernatural in favor of rational thought and proven ideas. So it's perhaps especially vexing for her when, on an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday in June, she gets a phone call from a friend who has just died.
That friend was Charlotte Boyce, Helen's roommate at Harvard. The two women had once confided in each other about everything--in college, the unwanted advances Charlie received from a star literature professor; after graduation, Helen's struggles as a young woman in science, Charlie's as a black screenwriter in Hollywood, their shared challenges as parents.
But as the years passed, Charlie became more elusive, and her calls came less and less often. And now she's permanently, tragically gone.
As Helen is drawn back into Charlie's orbit, and also into the web of feelings she once had for Neel Jonnal—a former college classmate now an acclaimed physicist on the verge of a Nobel Prizewinning discovery—she is forced to question the laws of the universe that had always steadied her mind and heart.
Suspenseful, perceptive, deeply affecting, Lost and Wanted is a story of friends and lovers, lost and found, at the most defining moments of their lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 21, 1975
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard Univeristy
• Awards—PEN/Malamud Award; Whiting Writer's Award; Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in New York City (Brooklyn)
Nell Freudenberger is the author of three novels—Lost and Wanted (2019), The Newlyweds (2012), and The Dissident (2006). Her 2003 story collection, Lucky Girls, was winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Beautiful, startling, affecting.… Freudenberger joins [an] august tradition of yoking poetry to cutting-edge science. She navigates complicated concepts from physics with admirable clarity. This is a novel about female friendship begun in America in the 1990s, when women didn’t talk about sexual harassment and friends didn’t talk about race; when women (and especially women of color) were trying to build careers and no one was acknowledging how much harder it would be for them than for white men. Under such strain, the book seems to say, it’s incredible that women sustain any friendships at all. And yet in this novel, even the distance between Charlie and Helen is moving: the space that opens between them reverberates with what might have been. I was moved by intimacies near and far, real and imagined, lost and found..
Louisa Hall - New York Times Book Review
Dazzling, ingenious… a gorgeous literary novel about loss and human limitations. Over the months that follow her friend Charlie’s death Helen, a distinguished professor of physics at MIT, grapples with grief, midlife regrets and the disruptive possibility of life after death. Freudenberger dramatizes, through Helen, both the dawning awareness that life doesn’t always allow for second chances and the great midlife consolation prize: a greater appreciation for those chances—and people—one has been given. Helen’s thoughts meander from a wry social observation to a digression on physics to a heart-rending epiphany [and] the novel ends with its own version of a "big bang." Freudenberger has a penetrating imagination.
Maureen Corrigan - Washington Post
Insightful… a search for a ripple in space-time becomes a symbol of how lives are changed by forces we cannot see. Freudenberger relates the momentous discovery by physicists of a gravitational wave. What other wonders might we be missing simply because, for the moment, we lack the instruments to detect them? The phenomenon that troubles Lost and Wanted is life after death—an age-old concern viewed here [through] the narrator, an MIT physicist. This novel is smart about the ways that parents try to explain mortality to children—kids are usually patronized in works of fiction, but in this book they’re on equal footing with the adults, who have no clearer understanding of what awaits us after death than they do.
Wall Street Journal
Absorbing, intelligent, touching… a bittersweet love story about a lost friend, a missed romance, and an all-consuming career. Freudenberger deploys physics as a catalyst for new perspectives on time and our trajectories through it, rather than just metaphorical ballast. She balances the science with tender, convincing portraits of two kids. Enriched by multi-level discussions about the spacetime continuum, whether Einstein believed in God, uncertainty, gravity, and, most notably, the force we exert on each other, Lost and Wanted is a moving story about down-to-earth issues: an outstanding achievement.
NPR
What do physics and grief have in common? How can a scientist reckon with the inexplicable, for instance, the appearance of a ghost? These are but two of the big questions that power this intellectually rich and soulfully deep novel by one of our most talented fiction writers.
Oprah Magazine
What happens to our souls when we die? Does our consciousness leave a trace on earth? Freudenberger explores the complicated nature of friendship—especially the relationships that we form in youth, as we are trying to discover ourselves—and delves into the existential questions that plague physicists and laypeople alike.… Lost and Wanted is prescient [in] connecting scientific and metaphysical faith in things that cannot be seen with the naked eye.
Newsday
Freudenberger’s novel is set in a Boston that calls to mind Henry James country, a bastion of correctness and rational thought. It is all the more jarring, then, when Helen Clapp, a single mother and tenured chair in MIT’s physics department, receives a phone call and then text messages from the afterlife. Helen doesn’t write off the transmissions as a hoax—she sits tight and collects data, all the while conducting a meticulous reexamination of her long and bewildering relationship with her estranged best friend, Charlie, who moved to Hollywood after college and died from an autoimmune disease. The book takes up weighty themes such as grief and sexism in the worlds of academia and entertainment, peppering the narration with evocative asides on black holes and quantum entanglement.… The prose is enticing [on] friendship, that most unstable and mysterious of connections.
Vogue
An affecting female friendship tale—Charlie, glamorous and alluring, and Helen, cerebral and self-assured—that takes a turn for the otherworldly.
Entertainment Weekly
A truly lovely story about friendship.
Cosmopolitan
(Starred review) Freudenberger explores the convergence of scientific rationality and spirituality in this stunning portrayal of grief.… Helen’s journey… is about grief not only at the loss of her friend but also at the demise of countless possible futures. This is a beautiful and moving novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [M]agnificent… a warm and insightful look into human relationships and the mysteries of time. Refreshingly, the… [scientific] concepts that Freudenberger describes are integral to the plot. And the story takes unexpected turns on its way to a heartbreaking conclusion.
BookPage
(Starred review) Compelling, seductively poetic; deeply involving, suspenseful and psychologically lush.… Freudenberger is spellbinding in her imaginative use of particle physics as a mirror of human entanglement and uncertainty.
Booklist
(Starred review) Brimming with wit and intelligence and devoted to things that matter: life, love, death, and the mysteries of the cosmos. Nell Freudenberger is good at explaining physics, but her real genius is in the depiction of relationships.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your impression of Helen at the beginning of the novel as compared to the end? Even with her rare intellectual abilities, and her scientific ways of thinking, does she discover new things to learn, and new parts of herself, in response to Charlie’s death?
2. What do you think brought Charlie and Helen together as friends in the first place? How did they learn to speak the same language, despite their different interests and backgrounds? And does this change, when Charlie passes away?
3. Describe the process by which Helen chose Jack’s father. Were you surprised by her preferences in the sperm donor, and what she values in Jack based on his father’s traits (including how different some of them are from her own)?
4. When Helen and Neel create the Clapp-Jonnal model at Harvard, she describes feeling…
the way people describe falling in love but it was so much better than the reality of that. The model gave me a kind of happiness that didn’t depend upon anyone else; it could be carried with you. I thought that this was what religious faith must be like, the peace in knowing that there was something beyond the world you knew, and that your own inner experience would indeed endure (42).
How does this reflect Helen’s own understanding of the limits of human knowledge?
5. Each of the three main characters—Helen, Charlie, and Neel—have their own feelings of not fitting in somehow. How does being different from others people bring these people toward one another? Consider also what Helen says about how, unlike herself, her friends weren’t "finding that their own ideas shifted under the influence of powerful fields created by two equally magnetic friends" (63–64). What does this suggest about Helen’s confidence in her own powers of attraction and influence on others?
6. Charlie comes from an affluent black family, with highly-educated parents, in Boston; Helen grew up in a middle-class white family in Los Angeles. Each of them ends up settling in the opposite city, on opposite coasts. How have both women sought to move away from their upbringings in adulthood? How do their family backgrounds—and the colors of their skin—continue to influence their lives they live?
7. What was your initial reaction to the messages Helen receives from Charlie’s phone? If you were Helen, how would you react? Do you think that her response to Simmi’s confession reflects relief or disappointment? And what was your own response to the story’s answer to that mystery?
8. Compare the children’s understanding of death and higher powers with that of the adults in the novel. Which kind of faith proves more accurate, and how might you see the children’s perspective influencing the adults’—and vice versa?
9. Charlie characterizes lupus as a disease that "basically rewires your neural pathways, so that your brain is getting messages that your body hurts when it really shouldn't doesn’t" (169). How is this reflected in what happens leading up to and after her death?
10. Many in her circle were alarmed and upset by Charlie’s decision to end her own life, especially her parents. Discuss the echoes of this decision on her family and her circle overall. Do you think she did the right thing?
11. There are many different kinds of love in the novel. Where are the lines drawn among certain kinds of love—romantic, platonic, unconditional—and when, if ever, does love become dangerous? Helen and Neel vacillate between romantic attraction and another kind of force-field. Discuss what happens to each of them at the end of the novel and whether it seems satisfying to them both to remain friends with a history. What do you think is surprising, if anything, about the fact that both Neel and Terrence are attractive to Helen?
12. Charlie’s experience with Pope radically changes the course of her time at Harvard, her career, and her friendship with Helen. How would someone in her situation react in today’s environment, perhaps especially on a highly-charged college campus? What did you think about the way Helen, years later, gets involved?
13. Neel comes back to Boston as part of the LIGO team, which is well on its way to making a huge discovery. How does the LIGO research on gravitational waves impact Neel and Helen’s careers—and also their relationship? Consider Helen’s comment that she is "betting on the idea that LIGO would record not only the gravitational waves from colliding black holes, but from pairs of neutron stars, exploding in what is called a kilonova" (115). Do you think that Helen and Neel’s professional rivalry is healthy or even productive?
14. At the end of the novel, after Terrence and Simmi leave the Boston area and the LIGO scientists win the Nobel Prize, Helen reflects that "to understand more of our cosmology, we’re going to have to admit that there may be laws so different from the ones we know, so seemingly counterintuitive, that it will take all our imagination to uncover them" (3157). Is there anything that Helen does know more definitively, after all she experienced? Have her own expectations of her life’s work, as a scientist, mother, and friend, changed?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Come Sundown
Nora Roberts, 2017
St. Martin's Press
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250123077
Summary
A novel of suspense, family ties, and twisted passions from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Obsession...
The Bodine ranch and resort in western Montana is a family business, an idyllic spot for vacationers. A little over thirty thousand acres and home to four generations, it’s kept running by Bodine Longbow with the help of a large staff, including new hire Callen Skinner.
There was another member of the family once: Bodine’s aunt, Alice, who ran off before Bodine was born. She never returned, and the Longbows don’t talk about her much. The younger ones, who never met her, quietly presume she’s dead. But she isn’t. She is not far away, part of a new family, one she never chose—and her mind has been shattered…
When a bartender leaves the resort late one night, and Bo and Cal discover her battered body in the snow, it’s the first sign that danger lurks in the mountains that surround them. The police suspect Cal, but Bo finds herself trusting him—and turning to him as another woman is murdered and the Longbows are stunned by Alice’s sudden reappearance.
The twisted story she has to tell about the past—and the threat that follows in her wake—will test the bonds of this strong family, and thrust Bodine into a darkness she could never have imagined. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Also known as—J.D. Robb; Sarah Hardesty; Jill March
• Birth—October 10, 1950
• Where—Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
• Awards—Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame (more below)
• Currently—lives in Keedysville, Maryland
Nora Roberts (born Eleanor Marie Robertson) is an American bestselling author of some 215 romance novels. She writes as J. D. Robb for the In Death series, and has also written under the pseudonyms Jill March and for publications in the U.K. as Sarah Hardesty.
Nora Roberts was the first author to be inducted into the Romance Writers of America Hall of Fame. As of 2011, her novels had spent a combined 861 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, including 176 weeks in the number-one spot.
Early years
Robertson was the youngest of five children in a family of avid readers. From the time she was little, reading books and making up her own stories were a favorite outlet. Her years at a Catholic school, she says, instilled a sense of discipline, through she transferred during her sophomore year to a public school. It was there, at Montgomery Blair High School, that she met her first husband, Ronald Aufdem-Brinke, and the two married — against her parents wishes — after graduation.
They settled in Blumpkin, Maryland, where Roberts gave birth to two sons, Dan and Jason. She later referred to this period as her "Earth Mother" years, spending much of her time doing crafts, including ceramics, and sewing her children's clothes. She also began writing. In 1983, after 15 years, the marriage ended in divorce.
Two years later, Roberts hired a carpenter to build a set of bookshelves. His name was Bruce Wilder, and Roberts fell in love. The two got married. Wilder owns and operates a bookstore in Boonsboro, Maryland, called Turn the Page Books. He also works as a photographer and videographer.
The Wilders own the nearby historic Inn BoonsBoro. Once known as the Boone Hotel, it was renovated following a 2008 fire, reopening in 2009. During the makeover, Roberts decided to name the inn's suites for literary romantic couples (but only those with happy endings).
Beginning to write
Roberts' career as an author began inauspiciously enough when a blizzard hit Maryland in early 1979. Roberts had been immersed in Harlequin romances, and that day, housebound with her small boys, she decided to try her hand at writing her own stories. She picked up a pen and began jotting down ideas for a romance. She was hooked on writing and kept at it. Despite rejections, one of her manuscripts was eventually accepted by Silhouette, a new imprint created specifically to scoop up Harlequin rejections.
In 1981 Roberts' first book, Irish Thoroughbred, was released. Twenty-two more romance novels followed under the Silhouette imprint, all using the pseudonym Nora Roberts. After switching to Putnam in 1992, the publishers told her they couldn't keep up with her output and suggested she write under another pseudonym. And so she began writing suspense romances under the name J.D. Robb (J and D are her sons' first initials).
Success and Awards
Since 1999, every one of Roberts's novels has been a New York Times bestseller, and 124 of her novels have ranked on the Times bestseller list, including 29 that debuted in the number-one spot. As of January 24, 2013, her novels spent a combined 948 weeks on the Times list, including 148 weeks in the number-one spot. Over 400 million copies of her books are in print, published in 35 countries.
Roberts is a founding member of the Romance Writers of America (RWA) and was the first inductee in the organization's Hall of Fame. In 1997 she was awarded the RWA Lifetime Achievement Award, which in 2008 was renamed the RWA Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. As of 2012, she has won an unprecedented 21 of the RWA's RITA Awards, the highest honor given in the romance genre.
Two of Roberts' novels, Sanctuary and Magic Moments, have been made into TV movies. In 2007, Lifetime Television adapted four Roberts novels into TV movies: Angels Fall starring Heather Locklear, Montana Sky starring Ashley Williams, Blue Smoke starring Alicia Witt, and Carolina Moon starring Claire Forlani. This was the first time that Lifetime had adapted multiple works by the same author. Four more films were released on four consecutive Saturdays in March and April, 2009. The 2009 collection included Northern Lights starring LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian, Midnight Bayou starring Jerry O'Connell, High Noon starring Emilie de Ravin, and Tribute starring Brittany Murphy.
Time magazine named Roberts one of their 100 Most Influential People in 2007, noting that she "has inspected, dissected, deconstructed, explored, explained and extolled the passions of the human heart." Roberts was one of only two authors on the list, the other was David Mitchell. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/19/2017.)
Book Reviews
The resort sections — complete with family banter and cozy meals — showcase the kind of writing in which Roberts shines.… Admittedly, some of the writing can be inane: descriptions of someone's red lipstick, which matches her boots, which match her dress…. But the punch to the gut are those scenes with Alice in captivity and, later, surrounded by her family. They impart a depth not normally found in standard romance. The question we're left with is this: Is Alice … still Alice? Can she ever be? READ MORE ……
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers
Roberts takes the reader on a journey to western Montana to a family ranch and the story of how one of their own disappeared.… [W]hat makes this novel most engaging is Roberts’s ability to suffuse her story with rich details of one family’s life, as well as sizzling doses of romance and mystery.
Publishers Weekly
Years before Bodine Longbow was born, her rebellious Aunt Alice left home to seek her fortune and…has not been heard from since.… Drawing on current events, Roberts has penned a horrifying tale of abduction, abuse, and resilience intertwined with a sweet romance that will keep the night-lights burning.
Library Journal
(Rave review.) With its take-no-guff heroine, who understands the importance of family and friends, and a compelling plot peppered with domestic details and composed of equal measures of spine-tingling suspense and sexy romance, this is quintessential Roberts
Booklist
(Starred review.) Roberts always tells a good story that balances romance and suspense, but in this title, the narrative is deeper, the mystery is more layered, and with Alice, Roberts moves into another level of exploring physical and emotional trauma…into more complex and darker storytelling, to terrific effect.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion for Come Sundown…then take off on your own:
SPOILER ALERT: If you've not read the book, proceed at your own risk.
1.. Come Sundown has two plotlines: Alice's ordeal and that of the present day Bodine Ranch. Did you find one story more engaging than the other?
2. Is Bo typical of a romantic heroine? Why or why not? What do you think of her response to Cal when he proposes?
3. How would you describe the Bodine Family, all four generations? Do you have a favorite? What makes them click and work together so successfully? Want to hazard any comparisons to your own family!
4. Some readers find the detailed descriptions of the ranch operations tiresome. Others appreciated the inside view of a family business fascinating. Where do you stand?
5. When the first dead woman turns up, the police turn their suspicions on Cal. Why? Were you suspicious?
6. Alice's ordeal is horrific. Talk about her abduction and imprisonment, and especially the man who captured and raped her. What was your experience reading Alice's chapters?
7. How does the book's title relate to the story?
8. Did you see the end coming? Had you figured out the identity of the villain? Or were you taken by surprise?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Overstory
Richard Powers, 2018
W.W. Norton & Co.
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393635522
Summary
Winner, 2019 Pulitizer Prize
♦ An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.
♦ An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut.
♦ A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
♦ A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another.
These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world.
From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans.
There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 18, 1957
• Where—Evanston, Illinois, USA
• Education—M.A., University of Illinois
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize, National Book Award-Fiction
• Currently—lives in the Smoky Mountian region of Tennessee
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. The Echo Maker, perhaps his best known work, won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction.
Early years
One of five children, Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois. His family later moved a few miles south to Lincolnwood where his father was a local school principal. When Powers was 11 they moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where his father had accepted a position at International School Bangkok, which Powers attended through his freshman year, ending in 1972.
During that time outside the U.S. he developed skill in vocal music and proficiency in cello, guitar, saxophone, and clarinet. He also became an avid reader, enjoying nonfiction, primarily, and classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Education
The family returned to the U.S. when Powers was 16. Following graduation in 1975 from DeKalb High School in DeKalb, Illinois, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a major in physics, which he switched to English literature during his first semester. There he earned the BA in 1978 and the MA in Literature in 1980.
He decided not to pursue the PhD partly because of his aversion to strict specialization, which had been one reason for his early transfer from physics to English, and partly because he had observed in graduate students and their professors a lack of pleasure in reading and writing (as portrayed in Galatea 2.2).
Career
For some time Powers worked in Boston, as a computer programmer. Viewing the 1914 photograph "Young Farmers" by August Sander, on a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, he was inspired to quit his job and spend the next two years writing his first book, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, which was published in 1985.
To avoid the publicity and attention generated by that first novel, Powers moved to the Netherlands where he wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, followed up with The Gold Bug Variations. During a year's stay at the University of Cambridge, he wrote most of Operations Wandering Soul; then, in 1992 Powers returned to the U.S. to become writer-in-residence at the University of Illinois.
All told, Powers has published a dozen books, winning him numerous literary awards and other recognitions. These include, among various others, a MacArthur Fellowship; Pushcart Prize, PEN/Faulkner Special Citation, Man Booker long listing; nominations for the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and the National Book Award itself in 2006.
In 2010 and 2013, Powers was a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University, during which time he partly assisted in the lab of biochemist Aaron Straight. In 2013, Stanford named him the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English.
While writing his 2018 novel, The Overstory, Powers left Palo Alto, California, moving to the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/16/2018.)
Book Reviews
Monumental…The Overstory accomplishes what few living writers from either camp, art or science, could attempt. Using the tools of the story, he pulls readers heart-first into a perspective so much longer-lived and more subtly developed than the human purview that we gain glimpses of a vast, primordial sensibility, while watching our own kind get whittled down to size.… A gigantic fable of genuine truths.
Barbara Kingsolver - New York Times Book Review
[Powers is] brilliant on the strange idea of "plant personhood" …opening our eyes to the wondrous things just above our line of sight. Memorable chapters unfold [with] many unforgettable images in a novel devoted to "reviving that dead metaphor at the heart of the word bewilderment."
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Remarkable.… This ambitious novel soars up through the canopy of American literature and remakes the landscape of environmental fiction.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A big, ambitious epic…Powers juggles the personal dramas of his far-flung cast with vigor and clarity. The human elements of the book—the arcs his characters follow over the decades from crusading passion to muddled regret and a sense of failure—are thoroughly compelling. So are the extra-human elements, thanks to the extraordinary imaginative flights of Powers’s prose, which persuades you on the very first page that you’re hearing the voices of trees as they chide our species.
Michael Upchurch - Boston Globe
The time is ripe for a big novel that tells us as much about trees as Moby Dick does about whales....The Overstory is that novel and it is very nearly a masterpiece.… On almost every page of The Overstory you will find sentences that combine precision and vision.
Times (UK)
An extraordinary novel.… An astonishing performance.… There is something exhilarating, too, in reading a novel whose context is wider than human life. The Overstory leaves you with a slightly adjusted frame of reference.… What was happening to his characters passed into my conscience, like alcohol into the bloodstream, and left a feeling behind of grief or guilt, even after I put it down.
Guardian (UK)
[I]mpassioned but unsatisfying.…Powers’s best works are thrilling accounts of characters blossoming as they pursue their intellectual passions; here, few of the earnest figures come alive on the page.… [T]he novel feels curiously barren.
Publishers Weekly
Standing as silent witnesses to our interweaving genealogies, cyclical wars, and collapsing empires, trees contain our collective history.… [A] deep meditation on the irreparable psychic damage that manifests in our unmitigated separation from nature. —Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A magnificent saga.… Powers’s sylvan tour de force is alive with gorgeous descriptions; continually surprising, often heartbreaking characters; complex suspense; unflinching scrutiny of pain.… [P]rofound and symphonic.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.… A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naive.
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 OVERSTORY … then take off on your own:
1. The Overstory is split into four sections: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. How do those sections reflect the thematic numerous concerns of the novel—that human development (in the micro and macro) mimics growth in the "natural world," that human beings are deeply, intimately bound to nature?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: The Hoel family keeps a photographic record of the American chestnut tree in their field. In what way does this photographic record of the tree's life mirror the family's own life?
3. Of the novel's nine opening stories, which do you find most engaging? Is that because you find the characters more compelling …or the storyline itself … or can't the two be separated?
4. What do you make of Patricia Westerford's statement:
You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.
5. Westover also says, "Forests panic people. Too much going on there. Humans need a sky." Do you panic in deep forests? (Forests are different than the lovely shaded groves and glens where we love to picnic.)
6. How does the author treat eco-warriors: are they the novel's heroes? Does he seem sympathetic to their causes … or impatient with their stridency? What is your attitude toward eco-warriors, both the ones in the novel and the ones in real life?
7. Some reviewers claim that characters in The Overstory get short-shrift, that they are subsumed by the book's ideas. Others say the book's characters are convincing and invested with humanity. Which view do you agree with? Do the characters come alive for you, are they multifaceted, possessing emotional depth? Or do you see them as fairly one-dimensional, serving primarily as the embodiment of ideas?
8. Has Powers novel changed the way you look at trees? Have you previously read, for instance, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, or Annie Proulx's novel, Barkskins?
9. What might the title, Overstory, signify? What is the pun at its heart?
10. What of this observation on the part of the lawyer who turns to novels for solace but then seems to question their value?
To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one.… The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Women Talking
Miriam Toews, 2019
Bloomsbury USA
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781635572582
Summary
One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting.
For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins.
Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women—all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in—have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?
Based on real events and told through the "minutes" of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1964
• Where—Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of Manitoba; B,J., University of King's College, Halifa
• Awards—Governor General's Award for Fiction (more below)
• Currently—lives in Toronto, Ontario
Miriam Toews ("tay-vz") OM is a prize-winning Canadian writer of novels and one non-fiction. She grew up in Steinbach, Manitoba, the second daughter of Mennonite parents, both part of the Kleine Gemeinde.
Through her father, Melvin C. Toews, she is a direct descendant of one of Steinbach's first settlers, Klaas R. Reimer (1837-1906), who arrived in Manitoba in 1874 from Ukraine. Her mother, Elvira Loewen, is a daughter of the late C.T. Loewen, a respected entrepreneur who founded a lumber business that would become Loewen Windows.
As a teenager, Toews rode horses and took part in provincial dressage and barrel-racing competitions. She left Steinbach at eighteen, living in Montreal and London before settling in Winnipeg. She has a B.A. in Film Studies from the University of Manitoba, and a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of King's College, Halifax.
Life and work
Toews wrote her first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck in 1996 while working as a freelance journalist. The novel, which explores the evolving friendship of two single mothers in a Winnipeg public housing complex, evolved from a documentary Toews was preparing for CBC Radio. The novel was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Toews won the latter prize with her second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding, released in 1998.
That same year, 1998, Toews' father, an elementary school teacher, committed suicide. Though he suffered from bipolar disorder much of his life, he was a beloved figure in the community and lobbied to establish Steinbach's first public library. After his death, the library opened the Melvin C. Toews Reading Garden in his honor.
Her father's death inspired Toews to write a memoir, using his narrative voice: Swing Low: A Life. The book, released in 2000, was greeted as an instant classic in the modern literature on mental illness; it won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award.
In 2010, almost 12 years to the day her father died, Toews' older sister and only sibling, Marjorie, also died by suicide.
In addition to her books, Toews has written for CBC's WireTap, Canadian Geographic, Geist, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, Intelligent Life, and Saturday Night. She is the author of The X Letters, a series of personal dispatches addressed to the father of her son, which were featured on This American Life in an episode about missing parents.
All told, Toews has received some 20 awards and honors over the years.
Books
1996 - Summer of My Amazing Luck
1998 - A Boy of Good Breeding
2000 - Swing Low: A Life (non-fiction)
2004 - A Complicated Kindness
2008 - The Flying Troutmans
2011 - Irma Voth
2014 - All My Puny Sorrows
2018 - Women Talking
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/17/2019.)
Book Reviews
[Toews's] celebrated novels are haunted by her upbringing, but she has never written with such heartbreak, or taken such sure aim at fundamentalism and its hypocrisies, as she does in her new book, Women Talking.… Did I mention the book is funny? Wickedly so, with Toews's brand of seditious wit…The ethical questions the women quarrel over feel strikingly contemporary: What are the differences between punishment and justice? How do we define rehabilitation; how do we enforce accountability? (To see these questions explored with such complexity and curiosity, with such open grief and that rogue Toews humor, makes me long for more novels reckoning with #MeToo and fewer op-eds.)
New York Times - Parul Sehgal
Miriam Toews's scorching sixth novel… skips over the rapes and the apprehension of the rapists, cutting straight to existential questions facing the women in the aftermath. Women Talking is a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism and, above all, forgiveness.… [Toews] depicts the women at the center of the novel with insight, sympathy and respect. Their conversation is loose, unpredictable, occasionally profane and surprisingly funny.… By loosening the tongues of disenfranchised women and engaging them in substantive dialogue about their lives, Toews grants them agency they haven't enjoyed in life. By refusing to focus on the crimes that launched this existential reappraisal, she treats them as dignified individuals rather than props in a voyeuristic entertainment.
Jennifer Reese - New York Times Book Review
Lean, bristling… a remarkably layered and gripping story.… The book's confined setting and its tight time frame combine to superb dramatic effect.
Wall Street Journal
A painful, thought-provoking, strangely lovely gem.… At the heart of Women Talking lies the question of how women can create a better world for themselves and for those they love amid a culture of male sexual violence, the continued power of patriarchy, their own differences, and the limits of language itself. It's a question that resonates across the globe today, and in answering it, we could do much worse than to start with the manifesto of the women of Molotschna: "We want our children to be safe.… We want to be steadfast in our faith. We want to think.
Boston Globe
Astonishing.… Toews, who has written often about her own Mennonite history, has told a riveting story that is both intensely specific and painfully resonant in the wider world. Women Talking is essential, elemental.
USA Today
This stark, masterful story takes a timely look at ideas of justice and agency (Best Books to Read This Spring).
Esquire
The award-winning novelist returns with what may be her most experimental work yet, giving voice to eight women as they grapple with the trauma and power of patriarchy (50 Most Anticipated Books of 2019).
Entertainment Weekly
I would follow the Canadian author anywhere she leads—this time to a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia where the women have been subjected to brutal attacks in the night first believed to be the work of demons. When they discover the atrocities were committed by men in their community, the women—who cannot read or write and require the group's schoolteacher to write down their conversations—must decide whether they will leave, exiting the only world they've known, or remain.
Huffington Post
[O]ne of the most anticipated books of the year for a reason. The story (based on true events) focuses on eight Mennonite women who—after being repeatedly drugged and attacked by a group of men in their community—meet in secret and decide how to reclaim their lives not just for their own future, but also for their daughters (Best Fiction Books of 2019).
Woman's Day
(Starred review) [R]eaders are able to see how carefully and intentionally the women think through their life-changing decision—critically discussing their roles in society, their love for their families and religion, and their hopes and desires for the future. This is an inspiring and unforgettable novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [A] sharp blade of a novel.… Toews' knowing wit and grasp of dire subjects align her with Margaret Atwood, while her novel's slicing concision and nearly Socratic dialogue has the impact of a courtroom drama or a Greek tragedy.
Booklist
(Starred review) An exquisite critique of patriarchal culture.… [T]he narrator is a man, but that's of necessity. These women are illiterate and therefore incapable of recording their thoughts without his sympathetic assistance. Stunningly original and altogether arresting.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Women Talking begins with "A Note on the Novel" which explains that the story is a fictionalized account of real events. What is the difference between reading this novel versus reading a news story or nonfiction book about these events? What questions does Women Talking encourage readers to ask themselves about these events and the environment in which they occur?
2. The book is told through August Epp’s notes from the women’s meetings. Why does Toews choose Epp to narrate this story? How does his perspective, gender, and personal history affect the vantage from which the story is told?
3. The women frequently discuss the complexity of continuing to love many of the men in their community despite their fear and they contemplate the circumstances under which the men would be allowed to join them in their new society. In what ways does the novel explore questions about male experiences, perspectives, and culture?
4. Which of the options would you have taken if you were one of the women? Explain why. Consider the consequences and benefits of your choice. How would you convince the others to join you?
5. The book examines both sexual and domestic violence. How does the women’s environment and circumstances dictate how they understand, interpret, and, ultimately,deal with violence? How does this intersect with their religious faith and their beliefs about their place in the world?
6. Discuss the power of language and literacy. How would the women’s lives be changed if they could read? How does their ability to interpret the Bible for themselves change the women’s understanding of their future?
7. How does this novel engage with mainstream political and social conversations about women and their rights?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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