You Bring the Distant Near
Mitali Perkins, 2017
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
320pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374304904
Summary
Nominated, 2017 National Book Awards
This elegant young adult novel captures the immigrant experience for one Indian-American family with humor and heart.
Told in alternating teen voices across three generations, You Bring the Distant Near explores sisterhood, first loves, friendship, and the inheritance of culture—for better or worse.
From a grandmother worried that her children are losing their Indian identity to a daughter wrapped up in a forbidden biracial love affair to a granddaughter social-activist fighting to preserve Bengali tigers, award-winning author Mitali Perkins weaves together the threads of a family growing into an American identity.
Here is a sweeping story of five women at once intimately relatable and yet entirely new. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Born—Kolkata, India
• Education—University of California-Berkeley
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area, California
Mitali Perkins is an Indian-American writer, the author of 10 books for young readers. She was born in Kolkata (Calcuta), India, but by the time she was 11, she had lived in six different countries on three different continents, plus an island: India, Ghana, Cameroon, London, New York and Mexico. The family finally settled in California, in the US, when Mitali was just entering her teens.
Perkins attended the University of California-Berkeley, where she studied political science. Later, she taught in the elementary and middle-school grades, as well as college.
She currently resides in San Francisco, California, where she is married to a Presbyterian minister. Pekins is currently a lecturer at Saint Mary's College of California. (Adapted from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [U]nforgettable…. Perkins’s vibrantly written exploration of a family in transition is saturated with romance, humor, and meaningful reflections on patriotism, blended cultures, and carving one’s own path (Ages 12–up).
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [C]aptures the unique and, at times, fraught experience of navigating multiple cultures. Perkins examines the delicate balance between meeting family expectations and attaining personal happiness.… [S]tunning. (Gr 9-up). —Lalitha Nataraj, Escondido Public Library, CA
School Library Journal
(Starred review.) Full of sisterhood, diversity, and complex, strong women, this book will speak to readers as they will undoubtedly find a kindred spirit in at least one of the Das women.
Booklist
[L]ushly drawn and emotionally resonant. The final third of the book, however…is less so; its plotlines…seem contrived and hastily written.… [Losing] steam and heart toward the end, the earlier chapters…make up for it (Ages 12-18).
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is the significance of Rabindranath Tagor's quote that appears before the novel begins?
2. How do attitudes toward gender differ between the various characters and between the generations?
3. What does Tara mean when she says: "She tells me I use the screen the way she uses reading and writing, but she's wrong. For her, that's escape. For me, it's research" (page 36)?
4. Why does Tara feel the need to perform and change her identity (page 37)?
5. What does Tara mean when she says that "power oozes from every American pore of her skin" when talking about Marcia Brady (page 41)?
6. What is the cultural significance of the conversation about Tara getting new shoes on page 45-46?
7. What do Ranee's attitudes toward gender reveal about the Indian notion of gender in the 1970s as opposed to the 1970s American idea of gender?
8. How would you describe the Das family dynamic? What does it reveal about each member?
9. Why do you think Ranee is so obsessed with social status and social standing?
10. Why does Sonia burn her journal (page 75)?
11. What traditions does each character hold onto? Which traditions does each give up? What do these say about each of the characters?
12. How does Sonia's conception of freedom change throughout the novel?
13. What does Tara's fear of becoming her mother say about her age (page 147)?
14. How do Chantal's fighting grandmothers resemble her mother and aunt's struggle to reconcile the differences in their two cultures? How do they represent her own struggle with her biracial identity?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Gone So Long
Andre Dubus III, 2018
W.W. Norton & Co.
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393244106
Summary
Andre Dubus III’s first novel in a decade is a masterpiece of thrilling tension and heartrending empathy.Few writers can enter their characters so completely or evoke their lives as viscerally as Andre Dubus III.
In this deeply compelling new novel, a father, estranged for the worst of reasons, is driven to seek out the daughter he has not seen in decades.
Daniel Ahearn lives a quiet, solitary existence in a seaside New England town. Forty years ago, following a shocking act of impulsive violence on his part, his daughter, Susan, was ripped from his arms by police.
Now in her forties, Susan still suffers from the trauma of a night she doesn’t remember, as she struggles to feel settled, to love a man and create something that lasts.
Lois, her maternal grandmother who raised her, tries to find peace in her antique shop in a quaint Florida town but cannot escape her own anger, bitterness, and fear.
Cathartic, affirming, and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become, and probes the limits of recovery and absolution. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Oceanside, California, USA
• Education—B.S., Univ. of Texas; Univ. of Wisconsin
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; National Magazine Award-Fiction, 1985
• Currently—lives in Newberry, Massachusetts
Andre Dubus III is an American writer best known as the author of the novel House of Sand and Fog, which was a National Book Award finalist in 1999 and was made into a movie in 2003. His other books include Bluesman, a 1993 novel, and The Cage Keeper and Other Stories from 1989.
Dubus's work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction. It has also been included in "The One Hundred Most Distinguished Stories of 1993" and The Best American Short Stories of 1994. He was one of three finalists for the 1994 Prix de Rome given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He started his college career at Bradford College (Massachusetts), where his father taught, before moving on to study sociology at the University of Texas. He eventually dropped out of a Ph.D. program in the theory of social change at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then roamed the country working at a variety of jobs, including carpenter, construction worker, bounty hunter, bartender, counselor at a treatment center, and actor, before settling upon being a fiction writer.
He lives in Newbury, Massachusetts, with his wife, dancer and choreographer Fontaine Dollas, and their three children. He currently is on the adjunct faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches general writing, fiction, and directed study courses.
His father, Andre Dubus (1936-1999), was a well known writer of short stories and novellas, and his cousin is the mystery writer James Lee Burke. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review) Dubus renders this story of love, jealousy, guilt, and atonement in a voice that rings with authenticity and evokes the texture of working-class lives.… This is a compassionate and wonderful novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) A dark and exquisitely crafted novel that views parental relationships as both a form of inherited violence and redemptive empathy. —Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY
Library Journal
Dubus evokes a dazzling palette of emotions…. Susan, Daniel, and Lois are fully realized and authentic characters… [in] this powerful testament to the human spirit asks what it means to atone for the unforgivable and to empathize with the broken.
Booklist
An ex-convict in his 60s pays a visit to the daughter he hasn't seen since the night he murdered her mother in 1973.… Ahearn is a uniquely sympathetic murderer, and the window we are given into Susan's memories and emotions …brings us very close to her as well.
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 GONE SO LONG … then take off on your own:
1. Did you find the number of Susan's flashbacks in the beginning of the novel confusing—perhaps trying to determine whether they were part of her novel or actual flashbacks? If so, did you finally settle in? Why might the author have used the technique—juxtaposing the two kinds of memories (some part of the novel and others in real-time)?
2. Have you ever experienced the types of flashbacks that Susan has, both in terms of the emotional content as well as the serial nature of them (one flashback leading to another)?
3. What do you think of Danny Ahearn? He's a murderer who killed his wife and the mother of his child. Does he deserve our sympathy? Does he deserve his daughter's and mother's-in-law sympathies?
4. It's forty years after Danny murdered Susan's mother. Talk about the lasting impact that trauma has had on Susan's life, both as a child and as an adult.
5. Follow-up to Question 4: Talk similarly about Lois, Susan's maternal grandmother and the mother of Linda. How has she dealt with her daughter's death over the years?
6. One of the primary questions this novel asks is whether redemption and forgiveness (is there a difference?) can ever come out of an act as horrific as Danny's?
7. Talk about the ending? What, if anything, is resolved? What is your opinion of how the novel ends?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Run Me to Earth
Paul Yoon, 2020
Simon & Schuster
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501154041
Summary
A beautiful, aching novel about three kids orphaned in 1960s Laos—and how their destinies are entwined across decades, anointed by Hernan Diaz as "one of those rare novels that stays with us to become a standard with which we measure other books."
Alisak, Prany, and Noi—three orphans united by devastating loss—must do what is necessary to survive the perilous landscape of 1960s Laos.
When they take shelter in a bombed out field hospital, they meet Vang, a doctor dedicated to helping the wounded at all costs.
Soon the teens are serving as motorcycle couriers, delicately navigating their bikes across the fields filled with unexploded bombs, beneath the indiscriminate barrage from the sky.
In a world where the landscape and the roads have turned into an ocean of bombs, we follow their grueling days of rescuing civilians and searching for medical supplies, until Vang secures their evacuation on the last helicopters leaving the country.
It’s a move with irrevocable consequences—and sets them on disparate and treacherous paths across the world.
Spanning decades and magically weaving together storylines laced with beauty and cruelty, Paul Yoon crafts a gorgeous story that is a breathtaking historical feat and a fierce study of the powers of hope, perseverance, and grace. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Weslyan University
• Award—New York Library Young Lion Award
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Paul Yoon is an American writer—author of two novels, Snow Hunters (2014) and Run Me to Earth (2020), and two short story collections, Once the Shore (2009) and The Mountain (2017).
His work has appeared in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories collection. The National Book Foundation him it one of its "5 under 35" awards.
Once on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, Yoon is now a Briggs-Copeland lecturer at Harvard University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, the author Laura van den Berg. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrireved 3/28/2020.)
Book Reviews
Richly layered…. Throughout the novel, beauty and violence coexist in a universe that seems by turns cruel and wondrous…. Yoon has stitched an intense meditation on the devastating nature of war and displacement (Editor's Choice).
New York Times Book Review
Spellbinding…. With his panoramic vision of the displacements of war, Yoon reminds us of the people never considered or accounted for in the halls of power.
Washington Post
[A] gorgeous book about the bonds of friendship and the ruptures of war. Even more significantly, in telling the stories of a trio of Laotian teens, it inverts and reorients the American war story…. Yoon is a master of subtle storytelling often leaving powerful emotions unexpressed, violent acts undetailed.
Los Angeles Times
Yoon's artfully orchestrated narrative illuminates this loudest, harshest, most chaotic of situations with restraint and elegance, finding and tracing an emotional thread that weaves the story into the reader's heart…. This unique work of historical fiction could not be more timely, or more timeless.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
[Yoon] writes with a soft, measured hand. He calmly builds memorable scenes even when events turn violent.
Associated Press
Yoon’s greatest skill lies in crafting subtle moments that underline the strange and specific sadness inherent to trauma…. As children around the world continue to grow up surrounded by violence and war, authors like Yoon seek to understand how experiencing those horrors shapes the adults they eventually become. And in Run Me to Earth, those horrors are scattered like unexploded bombs, waiting to go off at any time.
Time
Engrossing and luminous…. Yoon crafts an exceptionally human and poignant story.
Newsweek
This story of three Laotian orphans making their way through their war-torn world in the 1960s asks important questions about what it means to feel safe, and to call a place home.
Vogue
Run Me to Earth isn’t trying to educate or do the work of scholars and teachers; it has its own agenda. Art cannot supplant history, but it can amplify it.
New Republic
Yoon asks whether anyone can truly survive the ruins of war in this sparely written gem.… Yoon’s eloquent, sensitive character study… illustrates how the horrors of the past can linger…. This is a finely wrought tale about courage and endurance.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Yoon, ever the elegant and penetrating writer, coolly delivers a devastating sense of what it’s like to be in the midst of war…. Yoon, ever the elegant and penetrating writer, coolly delivers a devastating sense of what it’s like to be in the midst of war
Library Journal
(Starred review) Yoon again exemplifies his unparalleled ability to create a quietly spectacular narrative that reveals the unfathomable worst and unwavering best of humanity; the result here provides mesmerizing gratification.
Booklist
(Starred review) [Yoon is] stretching his abilities while still writing with deliberate, almost vigilant care…. [His] imaginative prose and affection for his characters make the story… [a]nother masterpiece in miniature about the unpredictable directions a life can take.
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 RUN ME TO EARTH … then take off on your own:
1. Consider how the violence of war and its continual bombing affects the three young children at the heart of Run Me to Earth.
2. In what way do the children manage to hold on to a shred of shared innocence, even as they sense that their lives will soon become harder.
3. Talk about how memories persist for years after the war, some filled with vivid suffering, others with deep tenderness. Which recollections most moved you—either because of their horror and brutality, or because of their humanity?
4. Alisak recalls the time he swallowed a tooth during a beating. "There were times this fact bothered him more than his own hunger or the sudden volley of gunfire." Why would that particular memory be so persistent?
5. What drives Prany to commit the violent acts that he does?
6. Twenty years after the end of the war, Khit tries to track down Alisak. Why does she search for him; what does she hope for. What did she and Prany feel for one another as teenagers, and how has that long ago connection affected her relations with her husband?
7. The novel begins and ends with Alisak. Why do you think the author made that choice? How has he been left after the war? How has the war continued to shape his life?
8. The novel begins as a single narrative line centered on the three children and Dr. Vang. Eventually, the storyline breaks up into separate strands. Talk about how the fractured structure reflects the shattered lives of the characters as a result of the ongoing war.
9. What is the complicity of America's intervention in Laos with the destruction it wrought?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Winter Soldier
Daniel Mason, 2018
Little, Brown and Company
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316477604
Summary
Vienna, 1914.
Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital.
But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus.
The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains.
But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings.
He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever.
From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1976
• Where—Palo Alto, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.D., University of California Medical School
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California
Daniel Mason is an American novelist and physician. He is the author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), and The Winter Soldier (2018).
Mason was raised in Palo Alto, California. He received a B.A. in biology from Harvard University and an M.D. from the UCSF School of Medicine. He spent a year studying malaria on the Thailand-Myanmar border, where much of The Piano Tuner was written. The novel later became the basis for a 2004 opera of the same name (composed by Nigel Osborne to a libretto by Amanda Holden).
Mason is currently a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University where he teaches courses in the humanities and medicine. He lives in the Bay Area with his family. (Adapted from the publishers and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2018.)
Book Reviews
Despite its serious concerns, The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures.… These pages crackle with excitement-and charging cavalries, false identities, arranged marriages, scheming industrialists and missing persons.… Within the meticulously researched and magnificently realized backdrop of European dissolution, Mason finds his few lost souls, and shepherds them toward an elusive peace. Lucius's "dream of being able to see another person's thinking" is not only the controlling metaphor of The Winter Soldier, but the work of literature more broadly. Lucius may fail, but the novel he carries is a spectacular success.
Anthony Marra - New York Times Book Review
The beauty of Mason's new novel persists even through scenes of unspeakable agony. That tension reflects the span of his talent.… The story that unfolds in this forsaken place is so captivating that you may feel as unable to leave it as Lucius does.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Epic.… Daniel Mason has harnessed the harsh clarity of winter to frame his urgent, cinematically beautiful third novel.… Lucius is an irresistible protagonist.… Not only does Mason make every crumb of pertinent history, culture, and geography so real throughout this saga that a reader feels instantly teleported into all of it: The Winter Soldier delivers, in shocking detail, a relentless inventory of the era's medical knowledge and practices.… Mason has created a magnificent world, urging us to savor every grain of it.
Joan Frank - San Francisco Chronicle
As lyrical as a Viennese waltz and as delicate as crystal, Mason's riveting novel examines the human heart and the wounds of war with clear eyes and compassion.
People
What I've found most remarkable about Mason's fiction is the quality of his revelations, his ability to unveil temperaments, habits, natures.… Although The Winter Soldier contains some of the most brutal moments of suffering I've encountered in fiction, they're never there just to move the story along. They allow the reader to sit very close to someone in great pain and listen to him.
Wyatt Mason - New York Times Magazine
[M]oving…. Mason’s old-fashioned novel delivers a sweeping yet intimate account of WWI, and in Lucius, the author has created an outstanding protagonist.
Publishers Weekly
[I]n 1914, Lucius, a promising medical student, enlists in the Imperial Austrian Army and ends up stranded in a typhus-ridden outpost in the Carpathian Mountains.… [L]yrical and affecting novel about the costs of war and lost love. —David Keymer, Cleveland
Library Journal
A sweeping story of love found and lost, steeped in medical details that reveal the full horrors that ill-equipped doctors and nurses faced over years of vicious trench warfare, The Winter Soldier is a vivid account of one man caught up in the epic forces of war.
Booklist
Mason's contribution to war literature involves almost no depiction of fighting but rather its aftermath, the tragically scarred soldiers, and the almost equally traumatized caregivers who sacrifice their health in providing medical help to the wounded.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel begins with an epigraph from a 1918 French book on neurological and psychological injuries in war. What different meanings (contemporary and otherwise) can you think of for the word "affections"? How might these different meanings relate to the plot of the book?
2. While the story mostly follows Lucius following his entry into medicine, there are frequent flashbacks to childhood. Which important moments in Lucius’ childhood can you identify? How do they shape the person he becomes and the decisions that he makes?
3. Consider Lucius across the duration of the book. How do you see him changing during this period? How is he a different person when the book ends?
4. What might you say about Lucius’ friendships? What are they based on? Does this change as he gets older?
5. A number of images repeat themselves throughout the book. What is the role that they play, either in representing something from Lucius’ life, or the larger movements of history? You may wish to consider:
a. The Grottenolm (p 7, p 123). What aspects of this little creature recapitulate themes of the book (for example, you may wish to think about translucency, blindness, its association with childhood and innocence)
b. The myth of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth (p 222, p 287)
c. The Uzhok meteorite (p 37, p 216)
d. The mermaid (p 20, p 252)
e. Hidden parents (p 9, p 82) f.X-rays (p. 16 and onwards)
6. This is a book of wounds, from the physical to the mental. Considering the different wounded characters, what do you think is the role of visibility and invisibility? How do characters’ wounds shape not only their experiences, but their understanding of themselves?
7. The inset to the book depicts a winged hussar from an early 17th century illustration. While the events of the novel take place in World War 1, much of Lucius’ conception of war comes from his father romantic tales of chivalry. How do you think such stories shaped Lucius and the decisions he makes?
8. What are the different roles that medicine plays in Lucius’ life? How does his relationship to medicine and patients change over time? How is this revealed, for example, by his interactions with the old Italian man with a brain tumor (p 13), Margarete’s illness (p 152), or patients’ families (p 225)?
9. Who do you think is the "the winter soldier" of the title?
10. What role does love play in the story? Do feel that the ending represents an embrace, a transformation, or a relinquishing of love?
11. Towards the end of the novel, we read "But what he was seeking was forgiveness and atonement, and he couldn’t think of any worthy offering to give." What role do themes of atonement and forgiveness play in the novel? Do you agree with Lucius at this point, does he have a "worthy offering" to give?
12. Primum non nocere (First, do no harm) is a fundamental principal of medicine, at one point (p 229), Lucius refers to his fateful decision as "his crime." Do you agree? What, in the context of the novel, does it mean to "do no harm"?
(Questions issued by the publishers.)
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Turtles All the Way Down
John Green, 2017
Penguin Young Readers
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525555360
Summary
Sixteen-year-old Aza never intended to pursue the mystery of fugitive billionaire Russell Pickett, but there’s a hundred thousand dollar reward at stake and her Best and Most Fearless Friend, Daisy, is eager to investigate.
So together, they navigate the short distance and broad divides that separate them from Russell Pickett’s son, Davis.
Aza is trying. She is trying to be a good daughter, a good friend, a good student, and maybe even a good detective, while also living within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.
In his long-awaited return, John Green, the acclaimed, award-winning author of Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars, shares Aza’s story with shattering, unflinching clarity in this brilliant novel of love, resilience, and the power of lifelong friendship. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 24, 1977
• Where—Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
• Rasied—Orlando, Florida
• Education—Kenyon College
• Awards—Michael L. Printz Award (twice); Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel;
Corine Literature Prize.
• Currently—lives in Indianapolis, Indiana
John Michael Green is an American author of young adult fiction and a YouTube vlogger. He is also a #1 Best Selling author on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Green grew up in Orlando, Florida, before attending Indian Springs School, a boarding and day school outside of Birmingham, Alabama. He graduated from Kenyon College in 2000 with a double major in English and Religious Studies.
Green lived for several years in Chicago, where he worked for the book review journal Booklist as a publishing assistant and production editor while writing Looking for Alaska. While there, he reviewed hundreds of books, particularly literary fiction and books about Islam or conjoined twins. He has also critiqued books for the New York Times Book Review and written for National Public Radio's All Things Considered and WBEZ, Chicago's public radio station. He lived in New York City for two years while his wife attended graduate school.
Green currently resides in Indianapolis, Indiana with his wife, Sarah, his son Henry, and his dog, a West Highland Terrier, named Willy (full name Fireball Wilson Roberts).
Writing
Green's first novel, Looking for Alaska (based on his own boarding school experience), won the 2006 Michael L. Printz Award presented by the American Library Association, and made the ALA 2005 Top 10 Best Book for Young Adults. The film rights to Looking for Alaska were purchased by Paramount in 2005 and the movie scheduled to be released in 2013.
His second novel, An Abundance of Katherines (2006), was a 2007 Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and may also be made into a movie in the future.
Green collaborated on a book with fellow young adult authors Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle called Let It Snow (2008), which contains three interconnected short stories that take place in the same small town on Christmas Eve during a massive snowstorm. The story that he penned is called "A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle". On November 27, 2009, the book reached number 10 on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback children's books.
Green's third novel, Paper Towns (2008 ), debuted at number 5 on the New York Times bestseller list for children's books, and the movie rights to Paper Towns have been optioned, with Green hired to write the screenplay. Paper Towns was awarded the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Novel and the 2010 Corine Literature Prize.
Green collaborated with fellow young adult writer and friend David Levithan on the 2010 book entitled Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and Green appeared on the Smart Mouths Podcast to discuss the book and collaboration.
Before Green's fifth book, The Fault in Our Stars, was released in 2012, he agreed to signed all 150,000 copies of the first printing, as well as his wife and his brother leaving their own symbols, a Yeti and an Anglerfish respectively. The New York Times Best Seller List for Children's Books listed the book at #1 within weeks.
John is also the cocreator (with his brother, Hank) of the popular video blog Brotherhood 2.0, which has been watched more than 30 million times by Nerdfighter fans all over the globe. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
No reviews have been published for this book as of yet. Once the book is published (October 10, 2017), reviews will be forthcoming … and we'll include them as they come in.
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.)