How to Walk Away
Katherine Center, 2018
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250149060
Summary
From the author of Happiness for Beginners comes an unforgettable love story about finding joy even in the darkest of circumstances.
Margaret Jacobsen is just about to step into the bright future she’s worked for so hard and so long: a new dream job, a fiancé she adores, and the promise of a picture-perfect life just around the corner.
Then, suddenly, on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life, everything she worked for is taken away in a brief, tumultuous moment.
In the hospital and forced to face the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again, Maggie must confront the unthinkable.
First there is her fiance, Chip, who wallows in self-pity while simultaneously expecting to be forgiven. Then, there's her sister Kit, who shows up after pulling a three-year vanishing act. Finally, there's Ian, her physical therapist, the one the nurses said was too tough for her.
Ian, who won't let her give in to her pity, and who sees her like no one has seen her before. Sometimes the last thing you want is the one thing you need. Sometimes we all need someone to catch us when we fall. And sometimes love can find us in the least likely place we would ever expect.
How to Walk Away is Katherine Center at her very best—a masterpiece of a novel that is both hopeful and hilarious; truthful and wise; tender and brave. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 4, 1972
• Raised—Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.F.A., University of Houston
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas
Katherine Center is the author of several contemporary novels about love and family. She graduated from St. John's School in Houston, Texas, and later earned her B.A. from Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize.
She went on to receive her M.A. in fiction from the University of Houston. While in graduate school, she distinguised herself as a writer and editor: she co-edited Gulf Coast, a literary fiction magazine, and her graduate thesis earned her a spot as a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.
Center is the author of 7 novels, starting in 2006 with: The Bright Side of Disaster. More recently she has published How to Walk Away (2018), which became a Book of the Month Club pick; Things to Save in a Fire (2019), and What You Wish For (2020). Center's work is often categorized as women's fiction, chick lit and mommy lit. She describes her books as "bittersweet comic novels."
Center currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two children.
Extras
- Along with Jeffrey Toobin and Douglas Brinkley, Center was one of the speakers at the 2007 Houston Chronicle Book and Author Dinner.
- Her first novel was optioned by Varsity Pictures.
- Center has published essays in Real Simple and the anthologies Because I Love Her, CRUSH: 26 Real-Life Tales of First Love, and My Parents Were Awesome.
- Center also makes video essays, one of which, a letter to her daughter about motherhood, became the very popular "Defining a Movement" video for the Mom 2.0 conference.
- As a speaker at the 2018 TEDx Bend, Center's talk was entitled, "We Need to Teach Boys to Read Stories About Girls."
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/15/2018.)
Book Reviews
[A] bittersweet tale of a young woman suffering from a devastating injury who learns to care about others when she can’t figure out what to do for herself.… Center transforms the story of a family tragedy into a heartfelt guide to living the fullest life possible.
Inspiring and romantic, this novel is similar to Jojo Moyes's Me Before You. The budding romance will draw readers in, but the relationships among the many other characters also make it memorable. —Holly Skir, Broward Cty. Lib., FL
Library Journal
(Starring review) Center knows how to keep the pages turning, ensuring readers will be completely swept up in Margaret’s story. With its appealing characters and wisdom about grappling with life’s challenges, Center’s sixth novel has all the makings of a breakout hit.
Booklist
(Starring review) A woman faces a new life after surviving a plane crash in this moving story…. A story that could be either uncompromisingly bleak or unbearably saccharine is neither in Center's hands… with plenty of romantic-comedy…[H]onest and wryly funny.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. After Maggie’s accident, everyone in her life reacts to the news in very different ways. What different ways of dealing with grief do you see on display in the novel, both healthy and unhealthy? How do you deal with tragedies in your own life?
2. On page 37, when Maggie wakes up from her time in the ICU, her mother says to her, "You were perfect," implying that she is now imperfect. Why do you think her mother reacts this way? What kind of impact do you think that comment has on Maggie when she’s already in an emotional state?
3. Throughout the novel, Maggie has to navigate her changing relationship with her family. At one point she says, "This was the trouble with sisters. This was the trouble with family. I had barely cracked open the door to my life, and she’d just barged in and made herself at home." Why do you think Maggie feels invaded by her family? Do you think that her family really was out of line, or was Maggie just struggling? How does your own family react in times of trouble?
4. On page 111, Maggie sees her skin grafts for the first time and thinks, "I would forever be someone who made other people uncomfortable." Her immediate concern isn’t about being less attractive, but about making others uncomfortable. What do you make of this reaction? What does it reveal about Maggie as a character? Why do we feel so uncomfortable around those who have physical differences?
5. The central focus of Maggie’s physical therapy and the thing that her mother and others fixate on is walking: to get her walking again. What do you think the ability to walk symbolizes, not just for Maggie but for people in general? Just freedom, independence? Or is there something more about the ability to walk on our own that makes us terrified of losing the ability?
6. Ian tells Maggie that it is the trying that heals you, not necessarily succeeding. Do you think he’s right? Why or why not? Do you think that, ultimately, it is the trying that heals Maggie?
7. While she is in the hospital, one of the people who provides Maggie with the most emotional support is her sister, Kitty. How do you see the relationship between Maggie and Kitty developing throughout the novel? Why do you think this happened, when they spent so many years estranged from each other?
8. Maggie’s life has been divided into a "before" and an "after" by the accident. Have you experienced something that split your life like this? How do you think you can mesh the two people—the old you and the new you? Where can you see Maggie struggling to do this? Where can you see her succeeding?
9. On page 165, Maggie thinks, "This was my mangled body and my hopeless soul, stepping up at last." What does she mean by this? What motivates her to step up when she would rather give up? How do we come to terms with our own "hopeless souls" in our lives?
10. One of the epigraphs that opens the novel is a quote from Eve Lapin that says "There are all kinds of happy endings." What do you think of the ending of this story? What kind of happy ending is it? Is it satisfying, even if everything isn’t perfect?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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Weather
Jenny Offill, 2020
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385351102
Summary
From the author of the nationwide best seller Dept. of Speculation—one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year—a hilarious and shimmering tour de force about a family, and a nation, in crisis
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practice her other calling: she is a fake shrink.
For years she has tended to her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but Lizzie has little chance to spend her new free time with husband and son before her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal.
Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, "Hell and High Water," and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right-wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.
As Lizzie dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls. When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to address the limits of her own experience.
But still she tries to save everyone, using everything she's learned about empathy and despair, conscience and collusion, from her years of wandering the library stacks…. And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in—funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1968
• Where—Massachusetts, USA
• Education—University of North Carolina-Chapel HIll
• Currently—New York, New York
Jenny Offill is an American author of three novels. Her first, Last Things (1999), was a New York Times Notable book and a finalist for the L.A Times First Book Award. Dept. of Speculation (2014), Ofill's second novel, received highly favorably reviews, as has her third, Weather published in (2020).
Offill is also the co-editor with Elissa Schappell of two anthologies of essays and is the author of several children's books. She has taught in the MFA programs at Brooklyn College, Columbia University and Queens University.[ She currently resides as the Writer-in-Residence at Vassar College. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/24/2020.)
Book Reviews
Offill takes subjects that could easily become pedantic—the tensions between self-involvement and social engagement—and makes them thrilling and hilarious and terrifying and alive by letting her characters live on these multiple scales at once, as we all do. Weather is a novel reckoning with the simultaneity of daily life and global crisis, what it means for a woman to be all of these things: a mother packing her son's backpack and putting away the dog's "slobber frog," a sister helping her recovering-addict brother take care of his infant daughter, and a citizen of a possibly doomed planet that might be a very different place for the son whose backpack she is packing, when he packs his own son's backpack decades from now, or certainly when that someday-son does the same for his own children.
Leslie Jamison - New York Times Book Review
[M]elancholy and satirical…Offill has genuine gifts as a comic novelist. Weather is her most soulful book, as well…. Offill's humor is saving humor; it's as if she's splashing vinegar to deglaze a pan.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Tiny in size but immense in scope, radically disorienting yet reassuringly humane, strikingly eccentric and completely irresistible…utterly exhilarating in its wit and intelligence…luminous.
Boston Globe
Genius…. [A] lapidary masterwork…. Remarkable and resonant…. The right novel for the end of the world.
Los Angeles Times
(Starred review) A librarian becomes increasingly obsessed with doomsday preparations…. Lizzie’s apocalyptic worries are bittersweet, but also always wry and wise. Offill offers an acerbic observer with a wide-ranging mind in this marvelous novel.
Publishers Weekly
Lizzie Benson, a librarian…[is] barely able to spend time with her husband and son as she fusses over her devout mother and addict brother…. [E]ventually Lizzie must look to the larger world and recognize that she can't save everyone—though she keeps trying.
Library Journal
Another crisply revelatory portrait of a marriage and family in flux…. Offill…performs breathtaking emotional and social distillation in this pithy and stealthily resonant tale of a woman trying to keep others, and herself, from "tipping into the abyss."
Booklist
(Starred review) [C]lever and seductive…. The tension between mundane daily concerns and looming apocalypse, the "weather" of our days both real and metaphorical, is perfectly captured in Offill's brief, elegant paragraphs, filled with insight and humor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, 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)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
When the English Fall
David Williams, 2017
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616205225
Summary
A riveting and unexpected novel that questions whether a peaceful and nonviolent community can survive when civilization falls apart.
When a catastrophic solar storm brings about the collapse of modern civilization, an Amish community in Pennsylvania is caught up in the devastating aftermath.
Once-bright skies are now dark. Planes have plummeted to the ground. The systems of modern life have crumbled.
With their stocked larders and stores of supplies, the Amish are unaffected at first. But as the English (the Amish name for all non-Amish people) become more and more desperate, they begin to invade Amish farms, taking whatever they want and unleashing unthinkable violence on the peaceable community.
Seen through the diary of an Amish farmer named Jacob as he tries to protect his family and his way of life, When the English Fall examines the idea of peace in the face of deadly chaos: Should members of a nonviolent society defy their beliefs and take up arms to defend themselves? And if they don’t, can they survive?
David Williams’s debut novel is a thoroughly engrossing look into the closed world of the Amish, as well as a thought-provoking examination of “civilization” and what remains if the center cannot hold. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1969-70
• Raised—Falls Church, Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Virginia; M.Div., D.Min., Wesley Theological Seminary
• Currently—lives in Annandale, Virginia
David Williams is an American Presbyterian minister and author. His debut novel, When the English Fall, an apocolyptic story told from the perspective of an Amish farmer, was published in 2017.
Willams graduated from Falls Church High School, in Virginia, and received his B.A. from the University of Virginia. He went on to earn both a Master's and Doctoral degree (2003 and 2015 respectively) from Wesley Theological Seminary and is currently pastor of a small church in Poolesville, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C.
When not speaking from the pulpit, Williams likes to drive things: motocycles, forklifts, vans filled with Salvation Army bell-ringers, and cars with his two sons shuttling back and forth between school and activities. He and his family live in Annandale, Virginia.
For 10 years, from 1992-2002, he served as Grant Manager at the Aspen Institute, where he oversaw a peer-reviewed grant writing process to support social science research into nonprofits, nongovermental organizations, philanthropy, and voluntarism. He has also published articles in OMNI, The Christian Century, and Wired. He blogs at belovedspear.com. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Apocalyptic stories are popping up everywhere these days, but David Williams’s beautiful, contemplative novel takes an unusual approach. He follows the only survivors who are immune to the devastation — the Amish — and they’re getting along just fine.… Moral people placed in impossible situations forms the crux of most good fiction, and When the English Fall is no exception …a stand-out. It is thoughtful and thought-provoking — worthy of fine discussions for any book club. Highly recommended. READ MORE …
P.J. Adler - LitLovers
Entrancing [and] deceptively simple, lulling, holding, at times, the power of prayer.
Boston Globe
An unusually good post-apocalyptic novel.… When the English Fall is thoughtful and the events are believable—even if the members of the Order are a little too saintly to be so. (The hypocritical, unhappy, or judgmental members of the community remain firmly off-screen.) And Williams lets his characters avoid truly wrenching ethical dilemmas, which might have deepened the novel. But Jacob is written as a witness, not a man of action—and he is so likable Williams just about gets away with it.
Christian Science Monitor
I never realized I wanted a postapocalyptic Amish novel, but the premise is so perfect I can’t believe that it’s never been done before—or that someone did it so well on the first try.
Adam Morgan - Minneapolis Star-Tribune
[S]atisfying.The diary format means the scientific details of the storm’s effects are vague and the most horrifying events are only rumored; this increases tension and keeps the narrative from becoming as dehumanizing or shockingly violent as other tales of the end of the world.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [The diary] perspective provides more introspective focus.… [A] quiet, ideas-focused dystopian novel that will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page. —Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Williams' novel is the lyrical and weirdly believable diary of an Amish farmer…[after] some sort of atmospheric event knocks out the power grid everywhere.… A standout among post-apocalyptic novels, as simply and perfectly crafted as an Amish quilt.
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 … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the catastrophe: the solar storm itself and the disaster it causes in the post-industrialized "English" world. What do you see as the worst, or perhaps most horrific, part of the fallout?
2. How far fetched is such a catastrophe? David Williams based his novel on a massive solar storm that took place in 1859, which came to be known as the Carrington Event. See his essay in the Algonquin Reader. If such a disaster were actually to occur in our lives, how do you think we would all fare as a civilization?
3. How are the Amish portrayed in The Fall of the English—do they come across as saintly … naive … pragmatic? In what ways do they remain both untouched yet also affected by the calamity?
4. What role does 14-year-old Sadie play? How are her visions put to use? Does the use of magical realism (the visions) feel out of place to you in this work? Or do you think it enriches the story?
5. Jacob writes, "For us, life is much the same. But we are not the only people." How do the Amish respond to the suffering in nearby Lancaster? How do you see their responsibility, religiously and morally, to their English neighbors? How do the Amish themselves see their responsibility?
6. Follow-up to Question 5: Jacob writes: "Jesus taught that we should never allow the world's hate to move our hands against others among God's children." Yet as lawlessness moves closer to the their farms, what options are open to the Amish?
7. What is Jacob's relationship with Mike, and why does the bishop disapprove? Mike, for instance, listens to radio talk shows, warning about the global warming "hoax." Jacob wonders "why Mike bothers to listen …if all he receives is anger." In what way is Mike emblematic of the differences between the Amish and English cultures? Finally, how did you feel about Bishop Schrock's decision regarding Michael on October 20?
8. Follow-up to Question 7: Jacob writes of Mike's problems: "The sorrows are planted, and they grow strong in the earth of his life, and they rise up, and there is harvest." What does Jacob mean, and in what way is the comment prophetic?
9. In his Algonquin Reader essay, Williams says he hopes When the English Fall sheds light upon how connected we humans are despite our different beliefs. Does he succeed in his goal? How so?
10. Much of the horror takes place "off stage," out of sight of the reader. In what way does this distancing technique, heighten the novel's overall tension?
11. Jacob rides with a National Guard into Lancaster to see for himself the conditions of the English. Talk about what he observes there (Oct. 6: p. 133). He writes that he would not want to "choose their life":
[S]o much of my growing up was in a place where [the English] were not viewed as neighbors, but as dark and terrible and spiritually dangerous. In my heart and through my faith, I do not feel this to be true, but it is difficult to entirely lose that fear once it is planted.
What does Jacob's attitude about the outside world reveal, either about him or about the English? Is there any truth to what he fears (though wishes he didn't fear)?
12. Jacob owns a Smith & Wesson revolver. How does he see the differences between the Amish use of guns and the way the English use them?
13. Two competing versions of providence are considered in Jacob's diary. After the hurricane, some houses were unscathed while others were left damaged. Jacob's view holds that "It is just the way of creation." He believes that a damaged house is not God's punishment for its owner's sin. "It is just that we are humble, small creatures, and that the vastness of God's creation can break us so easily" (Oct. 15, p.139).
A different view was held by Jacob's uncle who blamed Jacob and Hannah for their inability to have more children. Jacob writes of his uncle:
He said I needed to examine my heart for sin. I needed to consider why God had inflicted this punishment on my family, and to repent of it (Oct. 17, p.154.).
Those divergent views exist today among a variety of denominations. 1) Bad things happen as a form of punishment for our sins. 2) Or bad things happen as part of the "vastness of God's creation." And if the latter is true, does that mean that we are not under God's protection? How do you conceive of providence?
14. What are your feelings about the book's ending?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
This Must Be the Place
Maggie O'Farrell, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345804723
Summary
An irresistible love story, an unforgettable family. Bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell captures an extraordinary marriage with insight and laugh-out-loud humor in what Richard Russo calls “her breakout book.”
Daniel Sullivan leads a complicated life.
A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and his wife, Claudette, is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway.
Together, they have made an idyllic life in the country, but a secret from Daniel’s past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home.
Shot through with humor and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit and deep affection. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK
• Raised—Wales and Scotland, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Costa Award; Betty Trask Award; Somerset Maugham Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Maggie O'Farrell is a British author of contemporary fiction, who was once featured in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. It is possible to identify several common themes in her novels—the relationship between sisters is one, another is loss and the psychological impact of those losses on the lives of her characters.
The Vanishing Act Esme Lennox was published in 2007. In 2010 O'Farrell won the Costa novel award for The Hand That First Held Mine. Her 2013 novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, also received wide acclaim.
Maggie was born in Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight she missed a year of school due to a viral infection, an event that is echoed in The Distance Between Us. Maggie worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as the Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday. She has also taught creative writing.
She is married to the novelist William Sutcliffe, whom she met at Cambridge. They live in Hampstead Heath, London, with their two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural," reads the epigraph to Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel—a quote from Louis MacNeice's poem Snow that might serve as an appetizer (or warning, depending on your proclivities) for what's to come. This Must Be the Place is an "incorrigibly plural" book, offering its story through a kaleidoscopic proliferation of points of view, fractured chronologies and geographical shifts. The result…is marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time…This wide-ranging novel has a vivid sense of play, despite its sometimes sober subject matter. Mostly, its experiments bear fruit.
Elizabeth Graver - New York Times Book Review
Compassionate.… Few contemporary writers equal Maggie O’Farrell’s gift for combining intricate, engrossing plots with full-bodied characterizations.
Washington Post
Extraordinary.… An engrossing novel… from a writer of impressive, perhaps masterly, skills.
Washington Times
Intensely absorbing.… O’Farrell writes novels in which you can happily lose yourself.
NPR
[M]agical…. There is enough possibility and randomness for three books, yet the story never feels overstuffed, and when it ends, the reader is stunned and grateful, relieved that in the face of all that can go (and have gone) wrong, some things have come right.
Publishers Weekly
On holiday in Ireland to escape the stress of a terrible custody battle, young American professor Daniel Sullivan meets and falls in love with celebrated actress Claudette…. They end up living blissfully together …but a secret from Daniel's past won't stay put.
Library Journal
[A] sophisticated story about love [with] an interlocking series of narratives set from 1944 to 2016, in places ranging from Sussex to Goa to Brooklyn…. Juicy and cool, this could be O'Farrell's U.S. breakthrough book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. For an epigraph, O’Farrell selected a quote from a poem by Louis MacNeice: "World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural." What does this mean? Why do you think she chose it?
2. We see various parts of the story through the eyes of more than a dozen characters, jumping back and forth in time. How do their points of view build on one another?
3. Daniel introduces Claudette to readers by saying, "My wife, I should tell you, is crazy" (page 5). Now that you’ve read the entire novel, do you believe he means this?
4. Why does Daniel’s hearing Nicola Janks’s voice on the radio set the entire story in motion?
5. On page 31, Daniel thinks,
That same feeling of dislocation between what you thought you were doing and what you actually did envelops me as I sit there, as I press my elbows into the surface of my desk. All along I’d thought my life had been one thing, but it now seems it might have been something else entirely.
What does he mean? Is he right about that?
6. The first chapter from Claudette’s perspective, "I Am Not an Actress," is told from the first-person plural and second-person point of view. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to tell that portion of the story like that? What effect does it have?
7. What does Niall’s eczema symbolize?
8. On page 59, Phoebe describes her feeling of dissociation, "Like I’ve been cut down the middle and I’m in two places at once, or I’m getting radio interference from somewhere, or I’m just a shadow." On page 361, Marithe describes a similar sensation. Aside from sharing a father, what is the connection between the girls?
9. What do we learn from the auction catalog of Claudette’s memorabilia?
10. When Myrna advises Daniel to go home—"ʻLeave whatever this is alone. What can be gained from turning over old coals?’" (page 118)—why doesn’t he listen? What could have changed if he had?
11. Several chapters are told from the perspective of minor characters, such as Lenny and Maeve. How does this reset your understanding of what’s happening?
12. Pascaline describes Daniel as "someone who is so… different on the inside from how they are on the outside" (page 134). What does she mean by that?
13. Why does Daniel’s career as a linguist, studying the way language changes, matter to the story? What does it tell us about his character?
14. What propels Daniel to track down Todd?
15. Why didn’t Todd give Daniel’s letter to Nicola?
16. How does Teresa’s story affect your understanding of Daniel’s behavior? What purpose does her story serve in the novel as a whole?
17. On page 249, Ari describes his stammer as being like an iceberg, "ʻOnly a small part of it is visible, while under the water is a large, jagged, dangerous mass of ice.’" What else in the novel might be described this way?
18. Grief affects some characters more profoundly than others. What similarities do you see in how Daniel and Niall dealt with Phoebe’s death? And differences?
19. Why does Claudette react the way she does when Daniel tells her about Nicola?
20. In the interview transcript, Timou tells the interviewer that Claudette ran away because of "you." "ʻNot you personally but what you stand for. You are the synecdoche for what she ran away from’" (page 314). What does this mean?
21. Rosalind’s chapter, "Always to Be Losing Things," reads almost like a stand-alone short story. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to add another layer to the novel? What do we learn here?
22. Rosalind tells Daniel, "ʻI have a theory …that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is’" (page 351). Does Daniel work this out? What does he say to Claudette?
23. Siblings—step-, half, full—play major roles in the novel. How might things have been different if, say, Lucas wasn’t always there for Claudette, or Ari didn’t eventually gain siblings of his own?
24. Toward the end of the novel, Daniel disarms Claudette by complimenting her on her parenting. Why does this have such an effect on her?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Wildling Sisters
Eve Chase, 2017
Penguin Publishing
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399174131
Summary
An evocative novel in the vein of Kate Morton and Daphne Du Maurier, in which the thrill of first love clashes with the bonds of sisterhood, and all will be tested by the dark secret at the heart of Applecote Manor.
Four sisters. One summer. A lifetime of secrets.
When fifteen-year-old Margot and her three sisters arrive at Applecote Manor in June 1959, they expect a quiet English country summer. Instead, they find their aunt and uncle still reeling from the disappearance of their daughter, Audrey, five years before.
As the sisters become divided by new tensions when two handsome neighbors drop by, Margot finds herself drawn into the life Audrey left behind. When the summer takes a deadly turn, the girls must unite behind an unthinkable choice or find themselves torn apart forever.
Fifty years later, Jesse is desperate to move her family out of their London home, where signs of her widower husband’s previous wife are around every corner. Gorgeous Applecote Manor, nestled in the English countryside, seems the perfect solution.
But Jesse finds herself increasingly isolated in their new sprawling home, at odds with her fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, and haunted by the strange rumors that surround the manor.
Rich with the heat and angst of love both young and old, The Wildling Sisters is a gorgeous and breathtaking journey into the bonds that unite a family and the darkest secrets of the human heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Eve Chase is the pseudonym of a journalist who has worked for a variety of magazines in the UK. She lives in Oxford, England, writing in a small garden shed, which she and her husband built—a way, she says, to get out of the house without having to rent office space.
Chase admits she's always been fascinated by houses...
[E]specially these old English homes, these ancestral houses that get passed down from generation to generation. More than bricks, stone, and mortar are passed down—along with the responsibility and great cost of upkeep, the secrets and scandals of the manor are passed on to future generations.
Another idea that caught Chase's fancy revolved around a group of children at play in one of those ancestral houses, particularly one that was falling apart. Those children—and the house—became characters in her first novel, Black Rabbit Hall, published in 2016. Her second, also a story about an old house, is The Wildling Sisters, published in 2017. (Adapted from Huffington Post.)
Book Reviews
A page turning, suspenseful novel with richly created characters, a twisting plot, and a gothic setting. A delicious, shivery tale!
ShelfAwareness
Atmospheric.… [W]ill appeal to fans of similar English-house mysteries, like those by Daphne du Maurier.
BookPage
In this latest story from Chase, the female protagonists successfully try on the roles of sister, cousin, stepchild, daughter, and mother without being crushed by the weight of jealousy or fear.
Library Journal
A solid addition to the suspense subgenre of old-English-country-house-with-secrets tales.
Booklist
In Margot's first-person sections, the investigation leads to a shocking night of violence. A bewitching gothic tale of sisters and secrets.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Did you have a favorite Wilde sister? Why or why not? Did the sisters remind you of your own siblings?
2. How does the novel portray family? Is sisterhood different for the Wilde sisters from how it is for Romy and Bella? Is the sisterhood bond different from brotherhood or from the bond between siblings of different genders? If so, why?
3. The novel asks us to consider how far we would go to protect those we love. Were you surprised by the decisions the Wilde sisters make? Margot thinks they are "bonded by blood" (p. 2). Do you think the sisters committed a crime? If so, are they all equally guilty?
4. When talking about Sybil, Moll tells Margot, "Like I believe in the Good Lord, she believes in Audrey" (p. 194). What does Moll mean? Discuss the role of faith in the novel. How does Sybil’s faith in Audrey shape her character? What does Margot have faith in? What about Jessie?
5. Margot misses Audrey terribly at the beginning of the novel, but as the summer progresses, her relationship to Audrey seems to change as well. What does Audrey’s friendship mean to Margot? Why do you think Margot goes along with Sybil’s fantasy? How does pretending to be Audrey change Margot?
6. Margot thinks "Applecote Manor was summer" (p. 38). How does visiting Perry and Sybil change the Wilde girls? Was there somewhere you went as a child that offered you a similar sense of freedom? Do you remember a particular summer in which you think your life changed?
7. Jessie feels as though she was destined to live at Applecote, and Margot also feels a lifelong bond with the property. Have you ever been drawn to a place? Why do you think the house calls to Jessie the way it does? Is its pull different for Margot?
8. Jessie and Will believe that Applecote Manor will be a "gentler, more benign" place than London, a city that "forces girls to grow up too fast, strips them of their innocence" (p. 3). Do you agree with their decision to move the girls? How does the house prove their expectations wrong? Have you ever moved somewhere in hopes of achieving a different lifestyle?
9. As the summer goes on, Margot notices that Sybil and Perry "are really one system, redistributing their appetites, that the marriage that once looked so dead may actually be alive at the roots" (p. 202). How does the novel portray marriage? How does marriage for Sybil and Perry differ from marriage for Jessie and Will, or for Will and Mandy?
10. Were you surprised by Harry’s confession to Margot? Why or why not? How do you feel about the way Audrey’s story ends?
(Questions issued by publisher.)