The Dutch House
Anne Patchett, 2019
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062963673
Summary
A powerful novel and richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go.
"Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?" I asked my sister. We were sitting in her car, parked in front of the Dutch House in the broad daylight of early summer."
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth.
His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.
The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled, by their stepmother, from the house where they grew up. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another.
It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.
Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together.
Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.
The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.
Filled with suspense, you may read it quickly to find out what happens, but what happens to Danny and Maeve will stay with you for a very long time.
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1963
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—Nashville, Tennessee
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; PEN/Faulkner Award; Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in Nashville, Tennessee
Ann Patchett is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is perhaps best known for her 2001 novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award and brought her nationwide fame.
Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray. Her father, Frank Patchett, who died in 2012 and had been long divorced from her mother, served as a Los Angeles police officer for 33 years, and participated in the arrests of both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. The story of Patchett's own family is the basis for her 2016 novel, Commonwealth, about the individual lives of a blended family spanning five decades.
Education and career
Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She managed to publish her first story in The Paris Review before she graduated. After college, she went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa
For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, writing primarily non-fiction; the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine's editors could be cruel, but she eventually stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine following a dispute with one editor, exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"
In 1990-91, Patchett attended the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there she wrote The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992 (becoming a 1998 TV movie). It was where she also met longtime friend Elizabeth McCracken—whom Patchett refers to as her editor and the only person to read her manuscripts as she is writing.
Although Patchett's second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994, her fourth book, Bel Canto, was her breakthrough novel. Published in 2001, it was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Britain's Orange Prize.
In addition to her other novels and memoirs, Patchett has written for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.
Personal
Patchett was only six when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and she lives there still. She is particularly enamored of her beautiful pink brick home on Whitland Avenue where she has lived since 2004 with her husband and dog. When asked by the New York Times where would she go if she could travel anywhere, Patchett responded...
I've done a lot of travel writing, and people like to ask me where I would go if I could go anyplace. My answer is always the same: I would go home. I am away more than I would like, giving talks, selling books, and I never walk through my own front door without thinking: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.... [Home is] the stable window that opens out into the imagination.
In 2010, when she found that her hometown of Nashville no longer had a good book store, she co-founded Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes; the store opened in November 2011. In 2012, Patchett was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is a vegan for "both moral and health reasons."
In an interview, she once told Barnes and Noble that the book that influenced her writing more than any other was Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow.
I think I read it in the tenth grade. My mother was reading it. It was the first truly adult literary novel I had read outside of school, and I read it probably half a dozen times. I found Bellow's directness very moving. The book seemed so intelligent and unpretentious. I wanted to write like that book.
Books
1992 - The Patron Saint of Liars
1994 - Taft
1997 - The Magician's Assistant
2004 - Truth and Beauty: A Friendship
2001 - Bel Canto
2007 - Run
2008 - What Now?
2011 - State of Wonder; The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
2013 - This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
2016 - Commonwealth
2019 - The Dutch House
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/5/2016.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review) [M]asterly…. [Patchett's] splendid novel is a thoughtful, compassionate exploration of obsession and forgiveness, what people acquire, keep, lose or give away, and what they leave behind.
Publishers Weekly
Not all of Patchett’s characters, particularly Maeve, are fully developed or believable, perhaps because of the narrator’s own limited powers of observation…. Still, this is an affecting family drama that explores the powerful tug of nostalgia and the exclusionary force of shared resentments
Library Journal
(Starred review) Patchett is at her subtle yet shining finest in this gloriously incisive, often droll, quietly suspenseful drama of family, ambition, and home.… Patchett gracefully choreographs surprising revelations and reunions as her characters struggle with the need to be one’s true self.
Booklist
(Starred review) [A] deeply pleasurable book about a big house and the family that lives in it.… [Patchett] proves herself a master of aging an ensemble cast of characters over many decades…. [T]his richly furnished novel gives brilliantly clear views into the lives it contains.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What are the many and varied details of the Dutch House—rooms, stairways, architectural specifics, furniture, windows and doors, etc.? What mood or personality does each space or element possess? What is the complex, overall effect? What might Danny mean when he says,"the house was the story" or that it was "impossible"?
2. What is the nature of the relationship between Maeve and Danny? What explains the longevity and power of their support and love for one another?
3. What is Cyril Conroy like? How might specific behaviors, routines, and decisions of his have influenced Maeve and Danny? Why was he "always more comfortable with his tenants than he was the people in his office or…in his house"? What was it about buildings that he loved so much?
4. What are Fluffy’s various, evolving roles in the Dutch House? What is her overall influence on Maeve and Danny?
5. What explains why Elna Conroy abandoned her children? In what ways might such a profounddecision be justified or not? Why, as Maeve argues, are men who leave their families oftenjudged less harshly?
6. What were the various effects of Elna Conroy leaving her husband and children? Was it preferable, as Maeve argues, to have spent some years with her and then lost her or, as Danny experienced, to never have known her? What are the particular emotional challenges of each experience?
7. What might be the significance of Maeve receiving a box of matches and instruction for how to light a fire from her mother on her eighth birthday?
8. When discussing Maeve’s diabetes, Danny suggests that, "the body had all sorts of means to deal with what it couldn’t understand." What does this mean? What is the relationship between physical health and emotional stress or trauma?
9. In what ways are Sandy and Jocelyn important to the various Conroys?
10. What are Maeve’s particular strengths and abilities? What are her priorities in life? What might explain her decision to stay at her unchallenging job or not pursue a committed romantic relationship or family of her own?
11. What forces—familial, social, cultural—might explain why the two males, Cyril and Danny, are in various ways "excused…from all responsibility" about the lives and struggles of the girls and women in the house?
12. What is the source of Andrea’s power? Why is she so bent on using it against the others—especially the women—in the house? What does she covet and care about?
13. What is significant about each of the portraits in the Dutch House?
14. Why do Maeve and Danny sit secretly in a car outside of the Dutch House many times throughout the years after they are exiled from it?
15. Consider the various literary allusions throughout the novel. What is suggested, for example, by Celeste reading Adrienne Rich’s Necessities of Life when Danny first meets her on a train or by Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping?
16. What were the "original disappointments" that Celeste felt about Danny? Why did her relationship with Maeve begin so well and become so acrimonious?
17. Despite completing medical school, why is Danny drawn so powerfully to the construction ,buying, and selling of buildings? What does he mean when he says he is "at home on a building site"?
18. What does it mean the Maeve and Danny "had made a fetish out of [their] misfortune, fallen in love with it"? What explains such powerful attachment to painful experiences and relationships? Why might Danny not want "to be dislodged from [his] suffering"?
19. Danny eventually realizes that "after years of living in response to the past, [he and Maeve] had somehow become miraculously unstuck." What does this mean? How did it happen? What explains the "insatiable appetite for the past" that Maeve and Fluffy shared? How does one determine when connections to the past are healthy or restrictive?
20. Later in life, sitting outside the Dutch House, Danny realizes that "the feeling of home" he was experiencing was due not to the house but "wholly and gratefully" to his sister Maeve. What defines and determines a feeling of home? What role does a house play or not?
21. What explains the very different responses Maeve and Danny have to their mother’s return?
22. What might it mean that, when confronted with an aged and enraged Andrea, Danny thinks he "had not been born with an imagination large enough to encompass this moment"? What’s the role of imagination in times of trauma or emotional difficulty? What is its relationship to compassion and empathy? When does imagination become unhealthy illusion?
23. After reuniting, Elna tells Maeve and Danny that when she left she "knew [they] were going to be fine." In what ways did they end up fine or not?
24. Finally, Danny realizes that "the rage [he] carried for [his] mother exhaled and died. There was no place for it anymore." What does this mean? What are other ways to process such anger and emotional pain?
25. What changes and transformations are suggested by May’s buying of the Dutch House? What might it imply that Danny walks with her through the darkness to enter it?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
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The Child
Fiona Barton, 2017
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781101990483
Summary
A brand-new novel of twisting psychological suspense.
As an old house is demolished in a gentrifying section of London, a workman discovers a tiny skeleton, buried for years.
For journalist Kate Waters, it’s a story that deserves attention. She cobbles together a piece for her newspaper, but at a loss for answers, she can only pose a question: Who is the Building Site Baby?
As Kate investigates, she unearths connections to a crime that rocked the city decades earlier: A newborn baby was stolen from the maternity ward in a local hospital and was never found. Her heartbroken parents were left devastated by the loss.
But there is more to the story, and Kate is drawn—house by house—into the pasts of the people who once lived in this neighborhood that has given up its greatest mystery. And she soon finds herself the keeper of unexpected secrets that erupt in the lives of three women—and torn between what she can and cannot tell. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—Cambridge, England, UK
• Education—N/A
• Awards—National Press Awards-Reporter of the Year
• Currently—lives in southwest France
Fiona Barton is a British journalist and novelist, born in Cambridge and now living in the southwest of France. She built a career in journalism: as senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at the Mail on Sunday. It was while working for that paper that she won Britain's National Press Award for Reporter of the Year.
Then, toward the end of 2004, in a "light bulb moment" over bad Chinese food, Barton and her husband, Gary, wondered what it would take to change the direction of their lives. As she told the Daily Mail:
I was 48 and a journalist, a job I’d loved and succeeded in for 25 years—Gary, 52, was a builder with his own business. We had two adult children, mortgages and all the paraphernalia of a full working life. Yet the idea of volunteering was so powerful that I remember it made our teeth chatter with excitement. We did lots of research talked to our family and, three years later, applied to Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO). It was both exhilarating and terrifying—we lived on £140 a month in a small flat, washing our clothes under a cold outside tap and coping with the occasional rat and cockroach. A year later [in 2008], we boarded a plane to Colombo in Sri Lanka to begin a two-year placement.
In Sri Lanka, Barton trained journalists facing exile and sometimes physical danger because of their work. Since then, she has worked with journalists from around the globe.
It was Barton's familiarity with news stories, however, that gave her ideas for novels she'd always hoped to write. Once liberated from the daily grind of deadlines, she was was able to turn to fiction. Her 2016 debut, The Widow, a story about a wife who suspects her husband of murder, became a bestseller and sold in 36 countries.
Next, in 2017, came The Child, which also grew out of a news story—the skeleton of a child discovered in a building site. Barton continues her writing, in the early morning, in bed, as she says on her website. Her only distraction is her noisy cockerel, Twitch. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
This being a Barton thriller, there’s more to pretty much everything than meets the eye.
Boston Globe
Fiona Barton has masterfully delivered again with The Child, her follow-up to her bestselling debut novel, The Widow....So many questions, so much perfect suspense….Barton tells the child’s story as only she can—brilliantly.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
[An] intriguing, twisty tale....With plenty of red herrings, nothing and no one is who they seem in this evocative puzzler.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
A twisty and tantalizing story you won't be able to put down.
Bustle
(Starred review.) Kate Waters, the catalyst for Barton’s devastating debut The Widow, returns in this strong if more subdued psychological thriller.… Readers patient with the relatively slow initial pace…will be rewarded with startling twists—and a stunning, emotionally satisfying conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Barton's second well-plotted outing, with its sustained tension and believable characters, is an excellent addition to the popular psychological thriller genre. Readers who liked Barton's first novel, Paula Hawkins's The Girl On a Train, and Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will love this. —Susan Clifford Braun, Bainbridge Island, WA
Library Journal
Barton flirts with melodrama at times but pulls back and allows her characters to develop into fully realized, deeply scarred women whose wounds aren't always visible. This is as much a why-dunit as a whodunit, with the real question being whether it's possible to heal and live with the truth after hiding behind a lie for so long.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe Emma and Jude’s relationship? Do you think Jude loves her daughter? Why or why not?
2. Do you think Kate plays a larger role in this book than she does in The Widow? How does her presence in the story affect how it unfolds? Why do you think this "cold case" investigation is so important to her initially, and does her motivation change over the course of the novel?
3. Several examples of victim blaming occur in the novel. For instance, in the initial kidnapping investigation, the police blame Angela for leaving her child alone in the hospital room. How does the book treat victim blaming? How might the story be different without it?
4. What is the role of journalism in the book? Like in The Widow, the media is inextricably linked with the police investigation. What do you think of Kate’s methods and involvement? Do you think the media help or hinder the police during crime investigations?
5. Discuss the theme of motherhood in the novel. Would you describe the women in the book as good mothers? Why or why not? How has motherhood affected each of the characters? How does it affect their interactions with each other?
6. Discuss Will’s character. Will is the only male character whose perspective is shown in the book. Do you think this is significant? Why do you think the author chose to include his perspective? How does it affect your feelings towards him?
7. Angela’s devastation over the loss of her child seeps into every aspect of her life, including her marriage and her relationship with her other children. Discuss the role of trauma and recovery, and how trauma can be passed down through generations.
8. Discuss the relationship between secrets and truth in this story. Almost all of the characters keep secrets. Whose actions are justified and whose are not? Use examples from the book to illustrate your points.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Perfect Mother
Aimee Molloy, 2018
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062696793
Summary
A night out — a few hours of fun…
What could possibly go wrong?…
Some people are so good at making perfect look easy.
They call themselves the May Mothers—a collection of new moms who gave birth in the same month. Twice a week, with strollers in tow, they get together in Prospect Park, seeking refuge from the isolation of new motherhood; sharing the fears, joys, and anxieties of their new child-centered lives.
When the group’s members agree to meet for drinks at a hip local bar, they have in mind a casual evening of fun, a brief break from their daily routine. But on this sultry Fourth of July night during the hottest summer in Brooklyn’s history, something goes terrifyingly wrong: one of the babies is taken from his crib.
Winnie, a single mom, was reluctant to leave six-week-old Midas with a babysitter, but the May Mothers insisted that everything would be fine. Now Midas is missing, the police are asking disturbing questions, and Winnie’s very private life has become fodder for a ravenous media.
Though none of the other members in the group is close to the reserved Winnie, three of them will go to increasingly risky lengths to help her find her son.
And as the police bungle the investigation and the media begin to scrutinize the mothers in the days after Midas goes missing, damaging secrets are exposed, marriages are tested, and friendships are formed and fractured.
Unfolding over the course of thirteen fraught days and culminating in an exquisite and unexpected twist, The Perfect Mother is the perfect book for our times—a nuanced and addictively readable story that exposes the truth of modern mothers’ lives as it explores the power of an ideal that is based on a lie. (From the publisher.)
Kerry Washington of TV's Scandal fame has purchased the film rights.
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1971-72
• Raised—Buffalo, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Duke University; M.A., New York University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Aimee Molloy has collaborated on seven books, including Maziar Bahari's Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival and Pam Cope's Jantsen's Gift: A True Story of Grief, Rescue, and Grace. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two daughters. The Perfect Wife is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Like most characters in thrillers, many of the May Mothers have secrets, some of which dilute the urgency of the investigation’s timeline. And Molloy repeatedly generates suspense by depriving the reader of information (as opposed to, say, having actually suspenseful stuff happen). But I was hooked anyway and stayed up late to finish. What do you call a book like that? Oh yeah: a page-turner. And it’s a rare and wonderful thing.
Katherine Heiny - New York Times Book Review
An electrifying thriller—and a subtle, savvy skewering of the endless expectations of modern motherhood (Book of the Week).
People
A desperate, thrilling mystery that you’ll think you have all figured out—until you realize you don’t.
Marie Claire
[It's Molloy's] characters’ anxieties that give the story life and substance. Molloy doesn’t fully earn her book’s big twist, but her clever narrative… heightens tension… while spotlighting the solitary struggles of motherhood.
Publishers Weekly
Impressive and satisfying.… This gripping and fresh novel will provoke as much thought as it does excitement.
BookPage
As the investigation gets underway, it seems that every member of the group has some pretty big secrets to hide.… Readers who can’t get enough of suburban suspense …will want to give this a try. —Rebecca Vnuk
Booklist
(Starred review) Molloy, a master of clever misdirection, deftly explores the expectations, insecurities, and endless judgement that accompany motherhood in this fast-paced thriller…. Mesmerizing.
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 THE PERFECT WIFE … then take off on your own:
1. How well does Aimee Molloy describe the issues of first-time motherhood—exhaustion and isolation, to name only two? If you're a mother do you relate to (even remember?) all the concerns and anxieties talked about in The Perfect Mother?
2. What do we learn about the various members of the May Mothers early on, before Midas goes missing? As chapters shift among various perpsectives, what else is revealed about each of them? How would you describe the individual characters? Is there a particular one you admire more than others …or find more interesting ...or more problematic?
3. Talk about the way the police bungle the investigation.
4. In an online interview, Aimee Molloy talks about her own, real-life support group, September Babies, and her belief that if something happened to one of the children, "all the women [would be] smearing our faces with war paint and lighting our torches and going out into the streets of Brooklyn.… We would not rest." Do you have a devoted group of friends like that—whose members have each other's backs?
5. Whom did you first suspect? How does Molloy use misdirection to put readers off the scent? Were you surprised by the twist at the end?
6. What's the significance of the book's title? Who is "the perfect mother"?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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.)
American Dirt
Jeanine Cummins, 2020
Flatiron Books
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250209764
Summary
Lydia Quixano Perez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable.
Even though she knows they’ll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store.
And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy—two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city.
When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.
Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence.
Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia—trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier’s reach doesn’t extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?
American Dirt will leave readers utterly changed. It is a literary achievement filled with poignancy, drama, and humanity on every page. It is one of the most important books for our times.
Already being hailed as "a Grapes of Wrath for our times" and "a new American classic," Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt is a rare exploration into the inner hearts of people willing to sacrifice everything for a glimmer of hope. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Rota, Spain; Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
• Education—Towson University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Jeanine Cummins is the author of the novels The Outside Boy (2010) and The Crooked Branch (2013) and the bestselling memoir A Rip in Heaven: A Memoir of Murder and Its Aftermath 2004). She lives in New York with her husband and two children. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
This novel is a heart-stopping story of survival, danger, and love.
New York Times
I devoured the novel in a dry-eyed adrenaline rush…. A profoundly moving reading experience.
Washington Post
A heart-pounding, page-turning, can’t-put-it-down, stay-up-till-3 a.m., adrenaline-pumping story…that examines, with sensitivity, care, and complexity of thought, immense, soul-obliterating trauma and its aftermath.
Los Angeles Times
American Dirt just gutted me, and I didn’t just read this book―I inhabited it….Everything about this book was so extraordinary. It’s suspenseful, the language is beautiful, and the story really opened my heart. I highly recommend it, and you will not want to put it down. It is just a magnificent novel (Oprah Book Club Pick).
Oprah
American Dirt is a literary novel with nuanced character development and arresting language; yet, its narrative hurtles forward with the intensity of a suspense tale. Its most profound achievement, though, is something I never could’ve been told…. American Dirt is the novel that, for me, nails what it’s like to live in this age of anxiety, where it feels like anything can happen, at any moment.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
This tense, illuminating novel takes off like a rocket.
People
The story is masterfully composed of timeless elements: the nightmare logic of grief, the value of human kindness, the power of love to drive us to do the unimaginable…. Cummins proves that fiction can be a vehicle for expanding our empathy.
Time
Heartfelt and hopeful, American Dirt is a novel for our times. Thrilling, epic, and unforgettable.
Esquire
Stunning…remarkable…. A novel as of the zeitgeist as any, American Dirt is also an account of love on the run that will never lose steam.
Vogue
(Starred review) [Cummins's] devastating yet hopeful work...breathes life into the statistics of the thousands fleeing their homelands and seeking to cross the southern border of the United States.... This extraordinary novel about unbreakable determination will move the reader to the core.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) In a book both timely and prodigiously readable, Cummins offers an unrelenting and terrifyingly you-are-there account of a Mexican mother and son fleeing to America after cartel violence takes their entire family.... An important book. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review) American Dirt may be the don’t-miss book of 2020.
Booklist
(Starred review) This terrifying and tender novel is a blunt answer to the question of why immigrants from Latin America cross the U.S. border—and a testimony to the courage it takes to do it.... [Propulsive,] intensely suspenseful and deeply humane.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Throughout the novel, Lydia thinks back on how, when she was living a middle-class existence, she viewed migrants with pity:
All her life she’s pitied those poor people. She’s donated money. She’s wondered with the sort of detached fascination of the comfortable elite how dire the conditions of their lives must be wherever they come from, that this is the better option. That these people would leave their homes, their cultures, their families, even their languages, and venture into tremendous peril, risking their very lives, all for the chance to get ,to the dream of some faraway country that doesn’t even want them (chapter 10, page 94).
Do you think the author chose to make Lydia a middle-class woman as her protagonist for a reason? Do you think the reader would have had a different entry point to the novel if Lydia started out as a poor migrant? Would you have viewed Lydia differently if she had come from poor origins? How much do you identify with Lydia?
2. Sebastian persists in running his story on Javier even though he knows it will put him and his family in grave danger. Do you admire what he did? Was he a good journalist or a bad husband and father? Is it possible he was both? What would you have done if you were him?
3. Lydia looks at Luca and thinks to herself: "Migrante. She can’t make the word fit him. But that’s what they are now. This is how it happens" (chapter 10, page 94). Lydia refers to her and Luca becoming migrants as something that happened to them rather than something they did. Do you think the author intentionally made this sentence passive? Do you think language allows us to label things as "other," that is, in a way, tantamount to self-preservation? Does it allow us to compartmentalize things that are too difficult to comprehend?
4. When Lydia is at the Casa del Migrante, she learns the term cuerpomatico—"human ATM machine"—and what it means. Were you surprised to learn how dangerous the passage is, and for female migrants in particular?
5. When Lydia, Luca, Soledad, and Rebeca are at the Casa del Migrante, the priest warns them to turn back: "If it’s only a better life you seek, seek it elsewhere…. This path is only for people who have no choice, no other option, only violence and misery behind you" (chapter 17, page168). Were you surprised that he would be issuing such a dire warning when he must know how desperate they are to be there in the first place? Under what conditions might you decide to leave your homeland?
6. When they get to the US–Mexican border, Beto says, "This is the whole problem, right? Look at that American flag over there—you see it? All bright and shiny; it looks brand-new. And then look at ours. It’s all busted up and raggedy" (chapter 26, page 273). Later he says, "I mean, those estadounidenses are obsessed with their flag" (chapter 26, page 274). Do you agree with Beto? Do the flags symbolize something more than just the countries they represent?
7. The term "American" only appears once in the novel. Did you notice? Why do you think the author made this choice?
8. When Luca finally crosses over to the United States, he’s disappointed:
The road below is nothing like the roads Luca imagined he’d encounter in the USA. He thought every road here would be broad as a boulevard, paved to perfection, and lined with fluorescent shopfronts.This road is like the crappiest Mexican road he’s ever seen. Dirt, dirt, and more dirt (chapter31, page 329).
Discuss the significance of the title, "American Dirt." What do you think the author means by it?
9. Read the passage below from the novel. Then consider: Do you think the narrator intends for the reader to wholeheartedly censure Lydia in this scene? Do you think Lydia is a stand-in for the reader and that the author is sending a broader message? After reading the author’s note, do you think the author includes herself in this group?
Lydia had been aware of the migrant caravans coming from Guatemala and Honduras in the way comfortable people living stable lives are peripherally aware of destitution. She heard their stories on the news radio while she cooked dinner in her kitchen. Mothers pushing strollers thousands of miles, small children walking holes into the bottoms of their pink Crocs, hundreds of families banding together for safety, gathering numbers as they walked north for weeks, hitching rides in the backs of trucks whenever they could, riding La Bestia whenever they could, sleeping in futbol stadiums and churches, coming all that way to el norte to plead for asylum. Lydia chopped onions and cilantro in her kitchen while she listened to their histories.They fled violence and poverty, gangs more powerful than their governments. She listened to their fear and determination, how resolved they were to reach Estados Unidos or die on the road in that effort, because staying at home meant their odds of survival were even worse. On the radio, Lydia heard those walking mothers singing to their children, and she felt a pang of emotion for them. She tossed chopped vegetables into hot oil, and the pan sizzled in response.That pang Lydia felt had many parts: it was anger at the injustice, it was worry, compassion, helplessness. But in truth, it was a small feeling, and when she realized she was out of garlic, the pang was subsumed by domestic irritation. Dinner would be bland (chapter 26, pages276–77).
10. Read the below passage from the novel. Then consider: If you were writing the rules for asylum eligibility, what would they be.
'I heard if your life is in danger wherever you come from, they’re not allowed to send you back there.'
To Lydia it sounds like mythology, but she can’t help asking anyway, 'You have to be Central American? To apply for asylum?'
Beto shrugs. 'Why? Your life in danger?'
Lydia sighs. 'Isn’t everyone’s?' (chapter 26, page 277)
11. Toward the end of the novel, Soledad "sticks her hand through the fence and wiggles her fingers on the other side. Her fingers are in el norte. She spits through the fence. Only to leave apiece of herself there on American dirt" (chapter 28, page 301). Why do you think Soledad spits over the border? Is doing so a victory for her?
12. "Luca wonders if they’re moving perpendicular to that boundary now, that place where the fence disappears and the only thing to delineate one country from the next is a line that some random guy drew on a map years and years ago" (chapter 30, page 317). In his 1971 book Theory of Justice, the philosopher John Rawls came up with what he called the "veil of ignorance." Rawls asked readers to think about how they would design an ideal society if they knew nothing of their own sex, gender, race, nationality, individual tastes, or personal identity. Do you think the decision-makers of the borders might have made a different decision if they had donned the veil of ignorance? Do you think borders are a necessary evil or might their delineation serve a societal good? Do you think that the world would be a better place if we all brought Rawls’s thought experiment to bear in our everyday individual and collective decision making?
13. Why do you think there are birds on the cover of the novel?
14. Read the passage below from the novel. Then consider: Do you think Lydia is better or worse off for not having known about the moment of her boundary crossing? What importance do rituals have in marking milestones in our lives? Can the done be undone, the past rewinded?
But the moment of the crossing has already passed, and she didn’t even realize it had happened. She never looked back, never committed any small act of ceremony to help launch her into the new life on the other side. Nothing can be undone. Adelante (chapter 30, page323).
15. Was Javier’s reaction to Marta’s death at all understandable? Humanizing? Do you believe that he didn’t want Lydia dead? Is what he did, in the name of his daughter, any less paternal than what Lydia does for Luca is maternal? (Questions issued by the publisher.)
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