Smile
Roddy Doyle, 2017
Penguin Publishing
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735224445
Summary
Just moved into a new apartment, alone for the first time in years, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s for a pint, a slow one.
One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and a pink shirt comes over and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from secondary school. His name is Fitzpatrick.
Victor dislikes him on sight, dislikes, too, the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories—of Rachel, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame, as the man who would say the unsayable on the radio.
But it’s the memories of school, and of one particular brother, that Victor cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity.
Smile has all the features for which Roddy Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue, the humor, the superb evocation of adolescence, but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. When you finish the last page you will have been challenged to reevaluate everything you think you remember so clearly. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 8, 1958
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., University College Dublin
• Awards—Booker Prize (more below)
• Currently—lives in Dublin
Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. He is the author of more than ten novels for adults, eight books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Background
Doyle was born in Dublin and grew up in Kilbarrack, in a middle-class family. His mother, Ita Bolger Doyle, was a first cousin of the short story writer Maeve Brennan. Doyle graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from University College Dublin. He spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer in 1993. His personal notes and work books reside at the National Library of Ireland.
In addition to teaching, Doyle, along with Sean Love, established a creative writing centre, "Fighting Words", which opened in Dublin in January 2009. It was inspired by a visit to his friend Dave Eggers' 826 Valencia project in San Francisco. He has also engaged in local causes, including signing a petition supporting journalist Suzanne Breen, who faced gaol for refusing to divulge her sources in court, and joining a protest against an attempt by Dublin City Council to construct 9 ft-high barriers which would interfere with one of his favourite views.
In 1987 Doyle married Belinder Moller, granddaughter of former Irish President Erskine Hamilton Childers. They have three children; Rory, Jack and Kate.
Work
Doyle's writing is marked by heavy use of dialogue between characters, with little description or exposition. His work is largely set in Ireland, with a focus on the lives of working-class Dubliners. Themes range from domestic and personal concerns to larger questions of Irish history.
Novels for adults
Doyle's first three novels, The Commitments (1987), The Snapper (1990) and The Van (1991) comprise "The Barrytown Trilogy,"centred on the Rabbitte family, from their teens into adulthood. All three novels were made into successful films
In 1993, Doyle published Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, winner of the 1993 Man Booker Prize, which showed the world as described, understood and misunderstood by a ten-year-old Dubliner living in 1968.
Doyle's next novel dealt with darker themes. The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996), is the story of a battered wife, narrated by the victim Paula Spencer, who returns 10 years later, in Paula Spencer (2006).
Doyle's most recent trilogy of adult novels is "The Last Roundup" series, which follows the adventures of protagonist Henry Smart through several decades, from Ireland to America and back again. The titles include A Star Called Henry (1999), Oh, Play That Thing! (2004), and The Dead Republic (2010).
Doyle's most recent books are three novellas: Two Pints (2012), The Guts (2013), and Two More Pints (2014). The Guts continues the story of the Rabbitte family from the earlier Barrytown Trilogy, focusing on a 48-year-old Jimmy Rabbite and his diagnosis of cancer.
Novels for children
Doyle has also written many novels for children, including "The Rover Adventures" series, which includes The Giggler Treatment (2000), Rover Saves Christmas (2001), and The Meanwhile Adventures (2004). Other children's books include Wilderness (2007), Her Mother's Face (2008), and A Greyhound of a Girl (2011).
Plays, screenplays, short stories and non-fiction
Doyle is also a prolific dramatist, composing four plays and two screenplays. His plays with the Passion Machine Theatre company include Brownbread (1987) and War (1989), directed by Paul Mercier with set and costume design by Anne Gately. designed by Later plays include The Woman Who Walked into Doors (2003); and a rewrite of The Playboy of the Western World (2007) with Bisi Adigun.
Screenplays include the television screenplay for Family (1994), which was a BBC/RTE serial and the forerunner of the 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked into Doors. Doyle also authored When Brendan Met Trudy (2000), which is a romance about a timid schoolteacher (Brendan) and a spunky thief (Trudy).
Doyle has written numerous short stories, several of which have been published in The New Yorker; they have also been compiled in two collections. The Deportees and Other Stories was published in 2007, while the collection Bullfighting was published in 2011. Doyle's story "New Boy" was adapted into a 2008 Academy Award-nominated short film directed by Steph Green.
Awards
1991 - BAFTA Award (Best Adapted Screenplay): The Commitments
1993 - Man Booker Prize: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
2009 - Irish PEN Award
2011 - French Literary Award: The Snapper
2013 - Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards (Novel of the Year): The Guts
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/10/2017.)
Book Reviews
In Fitzpatrick, Doyle has created an extraordinarily creepy antagonist: a bully who plays dumb but always gets under the hero's skin, a clumsy oaf who nevertheless can disappear like a cat into the darkness. Fitzpatrick's physical presence is palpable and unsettling, uncanny even.… Smile is something of a departure for Doyle — it's the closest thing he's written to a psychological thriller — but it nevertheless showcases his well-loved facility for character and dialogue. His ear and eye are peerless.
J. Robert Lennon - New York Times Book Review
The fear of honest disclosure is central to Mr. Doyle’s newest novel, Smile,about the lies men tell to make themselves appear normal.… Mr. Doyle’s signature clipped dialogue is still a feature of Smile, but this short, effective novel is about the truths that emerge when, despite himself, Victor lets himself talk.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Doyle was determined to write a novel that shocked — and succeeded.… This is a performance few writers could carry off: a novel constructed entirely from bar stool chatter and scraps of memory. But you can’t turn away.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Has anyone written as beautifully as Doyle on how love and violence lean right up against each other in childhood?… From the Booker Prize winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha to Smile, Doyle’s books bruise and cheer at the same time.
Boston Globe
Doyle's finest work since The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Smile combines tropes from the various strands of Doyle’s career … and merges them into a unique novel, one that is terribly moving.… Like all good literature, [Smile] will inspire debate but also admiration for the courage of a hugely successful writer who refuses to be predictable and uses the novel to challenge both the reader’s sense of ease and the nature of the form itself.
Guardian (UK)
Beautifully written, and beautifully observed.… Reading Smile, one is swept along — as in all Doyle’s novels — by the vibrancy of language, the vivid sense of character and place, but nothing prepares you for the final few pages where, in a twist of imaginative brilliance, everything you have read is turned completely on its head.
Daily Telegraph (UK)
[A] marvelous novel from this Irish master …in a novel that hinges on the fallibility of memory, a narrator’s misremembering of a crucial point is expected. What is unexpected it quite how far Doyle takes this.… It says a lot about Doyle’s power that he is able to create such an intensely moving book that yet drops so much of itself as it approaches its end.
Spectator (UK)
[Doyle] employs his sly humor and unparalleled ear for banter between convincingly imperfect characters to craft an unsettling work of psychological suspense . . . [an] artful meditation on pain, memory, and how we build the stories of our lives. It is his most powerful and sobering novel since The Woman Who Walked into Doors.
Seattle Times
Smile is no easy maneuver: tackling a sensitive subject with the grace and gravity it deserves, and freshly delivering what readers expect in Doyle’s fiction (wit, dialogue, and the accuracy of youth). That Doyle is also, 30 years in, inventing new ways of storytelling is brave and notable.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Doyle’s command of voice is absolutely sure, his dialogue authentic and the Ireland his characters inhabit — still a patchwork of fifties pietism and noughties cosmopolitanism — completely available to his and the reader’s understanding.… [A]n absorbing and expertly told story.
Financial Times
(Starred review.)Doyle skillfully depicts the triumphs and tragedies of the everyday, how the aging process humbles and ennobles, and how a single hasty decision made in one’s youth can define and destroy a mind and thus a life.
Publishers Weekly
[Doyle’s] masterly language and honesty … [and] ability to convey so much meaning through rapid-fire dialog in the Irish vernacular is unsurpassed.… Readers anticipating Doyle’s trademark wit and warmth will instead encounter a psychological mystery with an enigmatic ending that will have them flipping to the beginning looking for clues.
Library Journal
Doyle flavors a compelling character study with a soupçon of suspense, misdirecting readers for a powerful purpose that is only revealed at the shocking, emotionally charged ending.
Booklist
(Starred review.) The first-person narrative is fresh and bracing from Page 1.… It isn't until the final pages that the reader understands just what Doyle has done, and it might take a rereading to appreciate just how well he has done it. The understatement of the narrative makes the climax all the more devastating.
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 Smile … then take off on your own:
1. The book's title is "Smile." Why is that ironic?
2. Describe the loneliness, perhaps despair, at the heart of Victor Forde's life. What role does Donnelly's pub play in easing his sadness? What does he want from his nightly visits?
3. Victor's career began with glittery promise. What happened? Same with his marriage.
4. What is it about Fitzpatrick that inspires in Victor an immediate dislike? What do you think of Fitzpatrick? How does he dredge up the pain of Victor's childhood — traumas which have lain buried within Victor's psyche for years?
5. What was the effect on Victor and his classmates of Brother Murphy's remark: "Victor, I can never resist your smile." Victor says, "I was doomed." In what way — what does he mean? Would such a remark as Brother Murray's be countenanced today? Why were they ignored or brushed off back then?
6. The tricks of memory, its unreliability, is one of the novel's themes. How does does memory both protect Victor and play tricks on him in this story? Have your own memories ever played tricks on you?
7. Did the novel's ending take you by surprise, perhaps shock, even disorient, you? What were your initial expectations?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The End We Start From
Megan Hunter, 2017
Grove/Atlantic
160 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802126894
Summary
A searing original, a modern-day parable of rebirth and renewal, of maternal bonds, and the instinct to survive and thrive in the absence of all that’s familiar.
As London is submerged below floodwaters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z.
Days later, she and her baby are forced to leave their home in search of safety. They head north through a newly dangerous country seeking refuge from place to place. The story traces fear and wonder as the baby grows, thriving and content against all the odds.
The End We Start From is an indelible and elemental first book — a lyrical vision of the strangeness and beauty of new motherhood, and a tale of endurance in the face of ungovernable change. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Megan Hunter earned a BA in English literature from Sussex University and an MPhil in English literature from Jesus College, Cambridge. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize International Creative Writing Competition, and she was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award with her short story "Selfing. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A short, haunting story about the end of days, sparse, beautiful and heroic.
Evie Wyld - Observer (UK)
Startlingly poetic.… Hunter writes with delicacy and precision; her imagery is pearlescent in places. It’s a sliver of a novel, but it shimmers. (Best Debut Fiction)
Natasha Tripney - Guardian (UK)
Ambitious, original and disturbing. (Best Debuts)
Fanny Blake - Daily Mail (UK)
Motherhood is an immersive experience and Hunter is brilliant on the urgency of it.... Hunter traces — with expert precision and such lyricism—who we are when life is minimized. How we respond under pressure, when time is measured in terms of where the next meal will come from.… Formally, and by placing motherhood at the center of the narrative, there is an echo of Jenny Offill’s Dept of Speculation... it is a highly interior story, in the hands of a narrator of great skill. As an exploration of motherhood, it’s a visceral, poetic confession. There is an extra resonance in reading The End We Start From in uncertain Brexit/Trump times — and who can say whether this is a worse dystopia than either of those? But there is a postdiluvian hope on these pages. There is meaning in community, in simple things, and in words and family. A world can be as small as three people, but it can contain multitudes.
Sinead Gleeson - Irish Times (UK)
[A] strange and haunting novella-cum-prose poem.… [O]ddly familiar, both to the narrator and to the reader, all the dystopian fiction that’s come before filling in the ellipses in Hunter’s narrative.… Virginia Woolf does cli-fi.… I found myself picturing scenes from Alfonso Cuaron’s film Children of Men while I read, Hunter’s narrative evoking a similar balance between the commonplace and the alien — of everyday life in a world that’s recognizably our own, but as seen through a glass darkly.… [T]he beating heart of this tender and tremendous story is without doubt Hunter’s portrait of early motherhood, an all-encompassing world of its own.
Lucy Scholes - Independent (UK)
The End We Start From is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in that it shares the same narrative detachment, and the same precise poetry. It is of course told from the perspective of a mother, rather than a father, and is set in a world that is only beginning to fall into chaos.… Megan Hunter's remarkable debut novel feels like the other half of the story.
Financial Times (UK)
Extraordinary.… [A] spare, futuristic fable about a brand-new mother navigating a flooded world. While it’s written with poetic reticence, it paints an expansive and moving portrait of the struggles and celebrations that any new parent faces against a backdrop that feels at once like a distant nightmare and an all-too-probable consequence of climate change.
Chloe Schama - Vogue.com
In elegiac lines, Hunter tells a love story through the eyes of a new mother, who witnesses the death of an old life and the start of a new one…a perfect portrait of rebirth the final testament that time, and life, do go on, despite our best efforts.
Cotton Codinha - Elle
A new take on the [dystopian] genre, this startling debut combines utter despair with the reality of family life.… Megan Hunter's prose is beautiful and insightful. Everyone who reads this will come away feeling renewed.
Sharmaine Lovegrove - Elle (UK)
Poetic and succinct, Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From is an etiological exercise for a climate-changed world — a post-apocalyptic novel in which current human mistakes are followed forward to dismaying ends.… Though the story is marked by incredible loss, the hope beyond the devastation is worth holding on for. Hunter’s is an uncommon disaster tale — lovely, intimate, and foreboding.
Michelle Anne Schingler - Forward Reviews
The postapocalyptic literary novel is currently in vogue almost to the point of redundancy, but Hunter’s slim yet sharp debut offers a level of precision and interiority rarely seen in the genre.… [T]his novel showcases Hunter’s considerable talents and range.
Publishers Weekly
The postapocalyptic literary novel is currently in vogue almost to the point of redundancy, but Hunter’s slim yet sharp debut offers a level of precision and interiority rarely seen in the genre.… [T]his novel showcases Hunter’s considerable talents and range.
Library Journal
A haunting take on modern disaster, this contemporary fable fuses the epic and the intimate, the semicollapse of society alongside the birth of a child.… Prescient in its depiction of climate change–induced catastrophe and timeless in its cleareyed understanding of love, Hunter’s tale gains impact from its plausibility.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The End We Start From … then take off on your own:
1. No one has a name in Megan Hunter's novel: neither the narrator/mother, her partner R and their child Z. R's parents are referred to as N and G. Why the initials and no names?
2. In what way is having a child, or motherhood, the central metaphor for the novel? How does Z's coming birth and infancy parallel the course of the flood? Is the point, perhaps, that becoming a parent feels like the end of the world? How could that be?
3. The narrator observes: "How easily we have got used to it all, as though we knew what was coming all along." What is she referring to — got used to what?
4. What do we know about the causes of the cataclysm? Or what do you surmise is the cause? Talk about the resulting devastation and collapse of British society — the traveling crowds on the road, food shortages, and refugee camps — the peril around every corner.
5. What prompts R to take off from the refugee camp, leaving the narrator on her own with the baby?
6. How would it be for you to raise a child in this less-than-Brave (i.e., "admirable") New World? Reading about Z's growth, we can contrast his normal development with the abnormal state of the world. Aside from protecting Z, what does the narrator hope to accomplish for her child? What skills will she pass on to him, or how will she enable him to live in this new world?
7. Some of the narrator's observations about motherhood and babies are very funny. Find some passages you find particularly humorous.
8. How do you react to Hunter's use of the italicized interludes, which seem to be based on various creation myths. Do they enrich the storyline? Do you find them lyrical and imaginatiive, or hollow and undeveloped, or perhaps just confusing? What is their purpose?
9. What was your experience reading The End We Start From? Reviewers have commented on the sparseness of Hunter's writing. Do you find it too sparse, wishing the prose had been more expansive? Or is the writing just brief enough to allow the story to come through? Why might the author have chosen to write in such an abbreviated style? Might she be alluding to the inadequacy of language to convey all that is happening in the world?
10. As a follow-up to Questions 9 and 2: Might Hunter's sparseness with language be another way to use motherhood as a metaphor for the altered world? Consider that a mother's bond to her child is primal, requiring few words. Nor do infants yet have the capacity for language to express their needs.
11. What does the book's title, "The End We Start From" mean?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The City of Brass
S.A. Chakraborty, 2017
HarperCollins
500 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062678102
Summary
An imaginative tale in which the future of a magical Middle Eastern kingdom rests in the hands of a clever and defiant young con artist with miraculous healing gifts.
Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent.
But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing—are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive.
But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to reconsider her beliefs. For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass — a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.
In Daevabad, within gilded brass walls laced with enchantments and behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments run deep. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, her arrival threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries.
Spurning Dara’s warning of the treachery surrounding her, she embarks on a hesitant friendship with Alizayd, an idealistic prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father’s corrupt regime. All too soon, Nahri learns that true power is fierce and brutal.
That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences. After all, there is a reason they say to be careful what you wish for. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
S. (Shannon) A. Chakraborty is an American writer of speculative fiction, whose debut novel, The City of Brass, was published in 2017. Chakraborty was born in New Jersey and now makes her home with her husband and daughter in Queens, New York City, New York.
The City of Brass, the first book in the planned "The Daevabad Trilogy," takes place in the 18th-century Middle East. The manuscript made news when it was purchased for somewhere in the "high six-figures" by HarperCollins. The publisher admitted to haven been taken by Chakraborty's ability to create "this wonderfully rich world" of the "Mughal Empire, the Sunni-Shia conflict, and Persian and Indian folklore." While "relevant to current events … it’s action-packed, delicious escapist storytelling at its best."
When she's not pouring over books on Mughal portraiture or Omani history, Chakraborty is active in the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers’ Group as one of its organizers. Hiking, knitting, and cooking "unnecessarily complicated medieval meals" at home, occupy whatever spare time is left. (Adapted from the Bath Novel Award and the author's website)
Book Reviews
The familiar fantasy theme of a young person learning of a hidden supernatural legacy is given new life in this promising debut novel.… [A] feisty, independent lead searching for answers … and a richly imagined alternate world.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This lyrical historical fantasy … a swiftly moving plot, richly drawn characters, and a beautifully constructed world that will entrance fantasy aficionados. —KC
Library Journal
Vivid descriptions percolate the lush prose, and a final twist leaves room for a sequel. Recommend this scintillating, Middle Eastern fantasy to fans of thoughtful, mystical adventures.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] compelling yarn of personal ambition, power politics, racial and religious tensions, strange magics, and terrifying creatures, culminating in a cataclysmic showdown that few will anticipate.… Highly impressive and exceptionally promising.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The City of Brass … then take off on your own:
1. Describe Nahiri: she has special abilities but also lacks authentic healing powers. As the novel develops what do we come to learn about those powers, as well as Nihiri's unfolding history and personality?
2. What does the ifrit see in Nahiri, and what does Dara see in her? What brings both of them forth during Nihir's attempted exorcism?
3. How much do you know about Djinns (also spelled Jinn)? How fully does the book explain their beginnings (and parallels to Judeo-Christianity), their functions and powers?
4. Who was Suleiman and what was his seal?
5. Discuss Daevabad? What are its many amazements that dazzle Nihiri? More pertinent to the novel's plot, what are the political, religious, and racial divides in the city? What injustices are evident to Nihiri?
6. Were you confused by Daevabad's numerous tribes, families, and their alliances? If so, did you eventually come to understand the multiple factions?
7. Talk about Dara's own tangled past? What was his role as an Afshin warrior?
8. What is Alizyd's role in fueling violence in Daevabad? What does he hope his efforts will accomplish?
9. Talk about S.A. Chakraborty's ability at world building. Has she been successful in creating a vibrant yet credible parallel world in The City of Brass? Are you looking forward to the next installment in the series?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Stealing Ghosts (The DeWitt Agency Files, 2)
Lance Charnes, 2017
Wombat Media Group
344 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780988690387
Summary
Dorotea DeVillardi is ninety-one years old, gorgeous, and worth a fortune. Matt Friedrich’s going to steal her.
The Nazis seized Dorotea’s portrait from her Viennese family, then the Soviets stole it from the Nazis. Now it’s in the hands of a Russian oligarch. Dorotea’s corporate-CEO grandson played by the legal rules to get her portrait back, but he struck out. So he’s hired the DeWitt Agency to get it for him – and he doesn’t care how they do it.
Now Matt and Carson, his ex-cop partner, have to steal Dorotea’s portrait from a museum so nobody knows it’s gone, and somehow launder its history so the client doesn’t have to hide it forever. The client’s saddled them with a babysitter: Dorotea’s granddaughter Julie, who may have designs on Matt as well as the painting. As if this wasn’t hard enough, it looks like someone else is gunning for the same museum – and he may know more about Matt and Carson’s plans than he should.
Matt went to prison for the bad things he did at his L.A. art gallery. Now he has a chance to right an old wrong by doing a bad thing for the best of reasons. All he has to do is stay out of jail long enough to pull it off. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.A. University of California, Berkeley; M.S.,California State University, Long Beach
• Currently—lives in Orange County, California
Lance Charnes has been an Air Force intelligence officer, information technology manager, computer-game artist, set designer and Jeopardy! contestant, and is now an emergency management specialist. He’s had training in architectural rendering, terrorist incident response and maritime archaeology, but not all at the same time. His Facebook author page features spies, archaeology and art crime.
Lance is the author of the international thriller DOHA 12, the near-future thriller SOUTH, and the DEWITT AGENCY FILES series of international art-crime novels. All are available in trade paperback and digital editions. He's also a frequent contributor to Macmillan's Criminal Element website. (From the author.)
Visit the author's website.
Follow Lance on Facebook.
Discussion Questions
1. The back-cover synopsis for this novel says that Matt’s "doing a bad thing for the best of reasons." Can good intentions make up for doing the wrong thing? How do Matt’s and Carson’s sins stack up against those of the other characters (seen and unseen)?
2. Put yourself in Ron Bowen’s and Julie’s positions. If the only way you can retrieve a priceless family treasure is to steal it, would you? If not, how else might you get that treasure back if legal measures have failed?
3. Do you have mementos of your grandparents or earlier relatives? If so, are there some that seem more precious than others? Why are they special? What resonance do you find in Julie saying about her grandmother’s other paintings (p. 282 in the print edition), "Those are just things she owned. This [meaning the portrait] is her"?
4. Did Julie become Gillian, or was she Gillian all along? Use examples from the text to support your conclusion.
5. Have you ever been in a romantic relationship with someone of a significantly different age? If so, were you the older or younger participant? Why did you do it? What did you learn from the experience?
6. Is Ute Kinigader a victim or co-perpetrator of her father’s crimes? Why?
7. Matt and Geisman debate how they should deal with Ute Kinigader after they interview her (Chapter 63, starting on page 298 of the print edition). Whose argument do you agree with more: Matt’s, or Geisman’s? Why? What third approach can you propose that they didn’t discuss?
8. Part of Matt’s motivation to finish this project is to atone for what he helped do to Ida Rothenberg, a Holocaust survivor his gallery cheated. Do you think he succeeds? Why or why not? What’s your definition of "atonement" or "redemption" in this situation?
9. Who was your favorite character, and why? Who was your least-favorite character, and why? Who was the strongest character, and what made him/her seem that way to you?
10. If you also read The Collection (the first in the DeWitt series): Describe how you think Matt’s and Carson’s relationship has changed from that story to this one. Why do you think this change happened? What do you expect of their relationship in future stories?
11. With which character do you identify with most closely? Why?
12. Did anything happen that surprised you? If so, what and why?
(Questions courtesy of the author.)
Ninth House
Leigh Bardugo, 2019
Flatiron Books
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250313072
Summary
The mesmerizing adult debut from Leigh Bardugo, a tale of power, privilege, dark magic, and murder set among the Ivy League elite.
Galaxy "Alex" Stern is the most unlikely member of Yale’s freshman class. Raised in the Los Angeles hinterlands by a hippie mom, Alex dropped out of school early and into a world of shady drug-dealer boyfriends, dead-end jobs, and much, much worse.
In fact, by age twenty, she is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide.
Some might say she’s thrown her life away. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend one of the world’s most prestigious universities on a full ride. What’s the catch, and why her?
Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale’s secret societies. Their eight windowless "tombs" are the well-known haunts of the rich and powerful, from high-ranking politicos to Wall Street’s biggest players.
But their occult activities are more sinister and more extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1975
• Where—Jerusalem, Israel
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Currently—lives in Hollywood, California, USA
Leigh Bardugo is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Shadow and Bone (2012) and Siege and Storm (2013). Ruin and Rising (2014) is the third installment in her Grisha Trilogy.
Six of Crows came out in 2015, which, although not yet announced, appears to be the first volume of a new series.
Leigh was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Los Angeles, and graduated from Yale University. She has worked in advertising, journalism, and most recently, makeup and special effects. These days, she’s lives and writes in Hollywood where she can occasionally be heard singing with her band. (Adapted from the author's website .)
Book Reviews
Bardugo's greatest power is ushering readers of any age through big, cast-heavy books with clarity and narrative precision. She is great at crime capers and misdirection…. Bardugo makes unexpectedly strong rivers of stories, purposed by swift currents of feeling. As you step further into the nasty and confusing dark of Ninth House, you feel for her caught-up characters. That's what usually gets discarded first in these genres when writers get distracted by world-building or struggle with plot. But Bardugo's characters feel real—and she doesn't forget that everyone hurts.
New York Times Book Review
Simultaneously elegant and grotesque, eerie and earthbound…. Wry, uncanny, original and, above all, an engrossing, unnerving thriller.
Washington Post
Ninth House is a lot of things. Its emotional superstructure is a fish-out-of-water story…. And Bardugo lives believably in this first skin, this initial level of ugly duckling strangeness that is familiar to anyone who has ever gone anywhere or done anything new.
NPR
(Starred review) Excellent… Bardugo gives [her protagonist] a thoroughly engaging mix of rough edge, courage and cynicism.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Genuinely terrific… The worldbuilding is rock solid, the plot is propulsive, and readers will be clamoring for a sequel as soon as they read the last page.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Atmospheric…Part mystery, part story of a young woman finding purpose in a dark world.
Booklist
(Starred review) With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.
Kirkus Reviews
(Starred review) Instantly gripping…. Creepy and thrilling…. The world of this book is so consistent and enveloping that pages seem to rush by.
BookPage
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for NINTH HOUSE ... then take off on your own:
1. Describe Galaxy "Alex" Stern and her troubled past, a background less than privileged compared to students at Yale. Why does Lethe enlist her? What is she tasked with as a member of the secret society?
2. How does Alex feel vis-a-vis her Yale classmates—her outsider status? How would you describe Yale itself: it's elitism, its customs, history, and even its vibe.
3. When Galaxy is first shown magic, she observes with near relief that "the world they’d been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned, that… everything [really] was full of mystery.” What does she mean by having to "abandon" the world because it didn't live up to its childhood promises? As an adult, do you ever feel disappointed by the world as it is? Have you ever yearned (do you yearn) for a magical world from your childhood fantasies? What would that world look like for you?
4. What are the specialties of each of the Houses of the Veil, and how does each house use its power in the larger world?
5. Power is one of the central concerns in Ninth House—who has it, who wants it, who uses it for good, and who uses it for evil. Line up the characters in terms of their drive and motivations for power. Where does Alex fall in all of this?
6. Alex simply wants to be a good student and to succeed in her life at Yale. Why then does she refuse to let go of Tara Hutchinson's death? Why is Alex so affected by it?
7. What do we learn, bit by bit, as Alex's story is pieced out to us? And what do you learn, by the end, why Alex finds herself alone, with no one by her side, trying to solve the mystery of Tara's death?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)