The Cloister
James Carroll, 2018
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385541275
Summary
From National Book Award-winning writer James Carroll comes a novel of the timeless love story of Peter Abelard and Heloïse, and its impact on a modern priest and a Holocaust survivor seeking sanctuary in Manhattan.
Father Michael Kavanagh is shocked to see a friend from his seminary days named Runner Malloy at the altar of his humble Inwood community parish .
Wondering about their past, he wanders into the medieval haven of The Cloisters, and begins a conversation with a lovely and intriguing museum guide, Rachel Vedette.
Rachel, a scholar of medieval history, has retreated to the quiet of The Cloisters after her harrowing experience as a Jewish woman in France during the Holocaust. She ponders her late father's greatest intellectual work: a study demonstrating the relationship between the famously discredited monk Peter Abelard and Jewish scholars.
Something about Father Kavanagh makes Rachel think he might appreciate her continued studies, and she shares with him the work that cost her father his life.
At the center of these interrelated stories is the classic romance between the great scholar Peter Abelard and his intellectual equal Heloïse. For Rachel, Abelard is the key to understanding her people's place in intellectual history. For Kavanagh, he is a doorway to understanding the life he might have had outside of the Church.
The Cloister is James Carroll at his best. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 22, 1943
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., USA; Wiesbaden, Germany
• Education—B.a., M.A, St. Paul's College (Seminary)
• Awards—National Book Award-Nonfiction; PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award-Nonfiction
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts
James P. Carroll is an American author, historian, and journalist. A Roman Catholic reformer, he has written extensively about his experiences in the seminary and as a priest, and has published books on religion and history, as well as works of fiction.
Early years and priesthood
Carroll was born in Chicago, Illinois, the second of five sons of late Air Force General Joseph Carroll (DIA), and his wife Mary. At the time, his father was a Special Agent of the FBI, which he remained until being seconded to, and later commissioned by, the US Air Force as an Intelligence Officer in 1948.
After this, Carroll was raised in the Washington, D.C. area and in Germany. He was educated at Washington's Priory School (now St. Anselm's Abbey School) and at an American high school, the H. H. Arnold, in Wiesbaden, Germany. He first attended Georgetown University before entering St. Paul's College, the Paulist Fathers' seminary, where he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees.
He was ordained to the priesthood in 1969. Carroll served as Catholic chaplain at Boston University from 1969 to 1974. During that time, he studied poetry with George Starbuck and published books on religious subjects and a book of poems.
He was also a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter (1972–1975) and was named Best Columnist by the Catholic Press Association. For his writing on religion and politics he received the first Thomas Merton Award from Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center in 1972.
Literary career
Carroll left the priesthood and the Paulist Fathers in 1974 to become a writer, and, in the same year, was a playwright-in-residence at the Berkshire Theater Festival. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Carroll's plays have been produced at the Berkshire Theater Festival and at Boston's Next Move Theater. In 1976 he published his first novel, Madonna Red, which was followed by nine others.
He has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, and his op-ed column appears weekly in The Boston Globe. He won the 1996 National Book Award for Nonfiction for An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us—a memoir about the Vietnam War and his relationships with his father, the American military, and the Catholic Church.
In a November 14, 1996 New York Times interview, Carroll explained why he wrote it:
I thought I would feel better. One of the effects of telling the story as I experienced it was for it to be redeemed, made meaningful. At the end, I found myself deeply in touch with the tragic aspect of the life we live. It's a highfalutin word, but there's something tragic to the story I told.
Nevertheless, after completing it, he said, instead of feeling relief, "I put my head down, and I wept."
He is the author of other books on religion and politics, including House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (2006), which won the first PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for non-fiction. Mr. Carroll's other works include the novels The Cloister (2018), Secret Father (2003), The City Below (1994), Memorial Bridge (1991), Prince of Peace (1984), Mortal Friends (1978), and Madonna Red (1976)
He has also written various plays and a book of poetry, Forbidden Disappointments (1974). Carroll's work has received the Melcher Book Award, the James Parks Morton Interfaith Award, and National Jewish Book Award in History, and has been frequently been named among the Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times.
Academic recognition
Carroll has been a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at the Harvard Divinity School.
He is a trustee of the Boston Public Library, a member of the Advisory Board of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life at Brandeis University, and a member of the Dean's Council at the Harvard Divinity School.
Carroll is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a member of the Academy's Committee on International Security Studies. He worked on his 2006 history of the Pentagon, House of War, as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Academy. Carroll is also a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston, where he wrote his latest book, Practicing Catholic, published in 2009.
Carroll married the novelist Alexandra Marshall in 1977. They have two grown children and live in Boston, Massachusetts. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 3/30.2018.)
Book Reviews
The Cloister poetically pingpongs between Abelard’s abbey in Saint-Denis in the 1100s, elsewhere in France during and after World War II, and Upper Manhattan in the early 1950s.… Carroll weaves a patchwork of disparate threads, threads unraveled from clerical vestments, that, when quilted together, spell out the single word that the book embodies.… Incandescent.
New York Times
In The Cloister, Carroll has produced a sweeping, beautifully crafted book–perhaps his best yet.
Wall Street Journal
A literary detective game.… In pushing his readers–in both his fiction and nonfiction–to ponder tough religious topics.… Carroll is continuing the important discussions made famous by Peter Abelard.
New York Journal of Books
James Carroll’s latest novel vibrates with deep compassion and religious intensity.
Christian Science Monitor
[A] heartbreaking blend of history and fiction. In 1142… the aging Abbess Heloïse finds the dead body of her former lover, Peter Abelard. This story line is woven together with the 1950 story of Father Michael Kavanagh…and Rachel Vedette, a museum docent.… [A] very magnetic, satisfying novel.
Publishers Weekly
The connection between the moral dilemmas of the two ages is muddy, and the alternating narratives slow the momentum. Still, this is a book of heart, with serious questions asked about faith, obedience, and love. —David Keymer, Cleveland
Library Journal
Fascinating in its evocation of the twelfth-century Catholic Church in France, this lavishly detailed historical novel serves as an education in historical philosophy, a poignant tale of devoted love, and a portrait of a postwar human crisis influenced heavily by both.… [T]hought-provoking.
Booklist
Of faith, doubt, and sorrow: Carroll delivers another religiously charged novel, and a fine one at that..… You don't have to be Catholic—or Jewish, for that matter—to appreciate Carroll's story, though it probably helps. A rich, literate tale well told.
Kirkus Reviews
A novel that shifts seamlessly between epic love story, the anatomy of a crisis of faith, family tragedy and trauma survival saga.… Both moving and enlightening, The Cloister will engross readers.
Shelf Awareness
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.)
The Arrangement
Sarah Dunn, 2017
Little, Brown & Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316013598
Summary
A hilarious and emotionally charged novel about a couple who embark on an open marriage — what could possibly go wrong?
Lucy and Owen, ambitious, thoroughly-therapized New Yorkers, have taken the plunge, trading in their crazy life in a cramped apartment for Beekman, a bucolic Hudson Valley exurb.
They've got a two hundred year-old house, an autistic son obsessed with the Titanic, and 17 chickens, at last count. It's the kind of paradise where stay-at-home moms team up to cook the school's "hot lunch," dads grill grass-fed burgers, and, as Lucy observes, "chopping kale has become a certain kind of American housewife's version of chopping wood."
When friends at a wine-soaked dinner party reveal they've made their marriage open, sensible Lucy balks. There's a part of her, though-the part that worries she's become too comfortable being invisible-that's intrigued. Why not try a short marital experiment? Six months, clear ground rules, zero questions asked.
When an affair with a man in the city begins to seem more enticing than the happily-ever-after she's known for the past nine years, Lucy must decide what truly makes her happy — "real life," or the "experiment?" (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 28, 1969
• Where—Phoenix, Arizona, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in Garrison, New York
Sarah Dunn an American author and television writer. She is known for the ABC sitcom American Housewife (starring Katy Mixon), as well as for her novels, The Big Love (2004), Secrets to Happiness (2009), and The Arrangement (2017). Her books have been translated into 19 different languages.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Dunn headed east to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude as an English major. She remained in Philadelphia after college, writing a humor column for the Philadelphia City Paper and waiting tables at TGI Fridays. A few years later, at the age of 24, Dunn published The Official Slacker Handbook, and was subsequently lured out to Hollywood to write for Murphy Brown, Spin City, Veronica’s Closet and Bunheads. With Spin City co-creator Bill Lawrence, Dunn penned Michael J. Fox's final episode of the series.
On her (now defunct) website, Dunn claimed to have moved from Los Angeles to New York five times, and from New York back to Los Angeles four times, which means she is still living in New York …or, as of this writing, in the state of New York. In 2007, Dunn married former New York Observer executive editor Peter Stevenson, and the couple lives in Garrison, New York, with their children.
Dunn is a member of the all-female television writer group "The Ladies Room," which also includes Vanessa McCarthy, Stephanie Birkitt, and Julie Bean. The group was founded in July 2016. (Adapted from various online sources.)
Book Reviews
Author Dunn is a bit of a genius when it comes to depicting upper-middle-class social mores, and this book will have readers snorting (yes, snorting) with laughter.
New York Post
For couples who have ever considered having an open marriage, or relationship, or whatever — sure, go ahead, have an affair — pick up a copy of Sarah Dunn's novel first. Because it's possible The Arrangement could push couples on the fence one way or the other, as she delves into the lives of one duo weighing whether to give that "open marriage" a test drive.… Of course, rules are broken, as are hearts and lives even in their cozy little suburban bunker. And Dunn writes it all with a removed grace.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Sarah Dunn has a terrific eye for the absurd, especially the ridiculous in everyday life.… Dunn's harpooning of the self-righteous denizens of Beekman is deliciously spot-on.… It's an arrangement worth telling — and reading.
Newark Star Ledger
The way this novel pushes and explores boundaries is commendable.
Toronto Globe and Mail
Meshes humor and hardship.
Time
This funny, honest novel pushes you to ponder what makes us happy.
Good Housekeeping
A smart, side-splitting exploration of contemporary attitudes toward love and commitment…not just revelatory and intriguing, but often downright hysterical.
Harper's Bazaar
Sarah Dunn's take on that point in middle-aged married life when everything falls apart is pure comedic genius, and you will absolutely find yourself looking at everyone you know and wondering who in the novel they most resemble.
Newsweek
Dunn's latest, about an attempted open marriage, is damn funny.
Marie Claire
Dunn has a keen eye for the comforts and absurdities of upscale suburban life.… Sensible insights about love are the novel's ultimate destination, but the ride is wildly entertaining.
People
This funny and relatable tale from the writer who crafted many of the mishap-laden stories on Murphy Brown and Spin City delivers the perfect escapist read in these angsty political times.
Esquire
Deliciously inventive…refreshing.
Elle
Dunn again plumbs the messiness and fallibility of romantic relationships in her latest novel.… At times…minor characters’ foibles border on the cartoonish, but they nevertheless contribute to an overall levity of tone that helps buoy what could otherwise have become a veritable catalogue of failing relationships.
Publishers Weekly
Dunn expertly reveals the intricacies that make up a marriage. Her characters are sure to strike a chord with readers, as they struggle to define themselves and their roles as spouses.… [A] multilayered novel that takes readers from funny to serious in a story full of truths, lies, and everything in between. —Erin Holt, Williamson Cty. P.L., Franklin, TN
Library Journal
Dunn's television-writing background is evident in her witty dialogue. She grounds her novel in the minutia of suburban life, contrasting the heady days of new romance with school drop-offs and soccer games.… [An]engaging and exhilarating exposé.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Despite Owen and Lucy's self-made troubles, they are eminently sympathetic and disarmingly appealing. [W]itty and well-written, it's the most satisfying sort—a true guilty pleasure. Dunn's dryly humorous story about a marriage that goes dangerously off-road never loses its groove.
Kirkus Reviews
The book charms with the author's compassion for all her foolish, bumbling characters...The Arrangement will make you smile.
BookPage
Dunn has perfectly captured middle-aged marriage, with its mix of the boring quotidian and moments of deep happiness.… Readers will be laughing helplessly as circumstances grow ever more fraught, but will also muse about what makes a truly happy marriage possible.
Shelf Awareness
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Arrangement … then take off on your own:
1. If you are married, or in a long-term relationship, have you ever thought about an open marriage? Or been tempted? Or maybe even had one? Why or why not?
2. Talk about the reasons Lucy and Owen decide to experiment with an open marriage? How is it supposed to make them stronger?
3. What are the cracks in any long-term relationship that propel people to wander out of bounds, either openly or (more often) secretly? Is the idea of "love" delusional? Must "new" love inevitably yield to "stale" love?
4. Talk about the couple's divergent experiences: Owen finding no real fulfillment, only more irritation; and Lucy falling inconveniently in love. What is it about Ben that makes Lucy fall for him? In what way is Owen also in over his head?
5. What do you think of Izzy. Crazy? Likable? In what way would you say Izzy remains true to her character?
6. What are the joys—or not—of a committed, monogamous relationship?
7. Talk about the rules that Lucy and Owen come up with. Do they make sense to you? If you were to do something similar, what rules would you insist on?
8. What does the book suggest about the differences between men and women?
9. Dunn's secondary characters are wonderfully drawn. Talk about some of them.
10. Numerous reviewers mention the book's humor. What made you laugh?
11. What is your take-away from The Arrangement?
12. If you've read the Autho Bio (above), you'll know that Sarah Dunn has written for television sitcoms. Can you detect notes of sit-com dialogue in The Arrangement?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Dread Nation
Justina Ireland, 2018
HarperCollins
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062570604
Summary
At once provocative, terrifying, and darkly subversive, Dread Nation is Justina Ireland's stunning vision of an America both foreign and familiar—a country on the brink, at the explosive crossroads where race, humanity, and survival meet.
Jane McKeene was born two days before the dead began to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—derailing the War Between the States and changing the nation forever.
In this new America, safety for all depends on the work of a few, and laws like the Native and Negro Education Act require certain children attend combat schools to learn to put down the dead.
But there are also opportunities—and Jane is studying to become an Attendant, trained in both weaponry and etiquette to protect the well-to-do. It's a chance for a better life for Negro girls like Jane. After all, not even being the daughter of a wealthy white Southern woman could save her from society’s expectations.
But that’s not a life Jane wants. Almost finished with her education at Miss Preston's School of Combat in Baltimore, Jane is set on returning to her Kentucky home and doesn’t pay much mind to the politics of the eastern cities, with their talk of returning America to the glory of its days before the dead rose.
But when families around Baltimore County begin to go missing, Jane is caught in the middle of a conspiracy, one that finds her in a desperate fight for her life against some powerful enemies.
And the restless dead, it would seem, are the least of her problems. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1978-79
• Where—San Bernardino, California, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Hamline University
• Currently—lives in York, Pennsylvania
Justina Ireland is the author of several young adult fantasy novels; her most recent, Dread Nation, (2018), is an alternate history of the Civil War in which zombies rise up from the battlefields.
Ireland was born and raised in California: first, in San Bernardino; then, in her sophomore year of high school, she moved to Walnut Grove. At 19 she joined the U.S. Army in order to pay for the cost of college. While serving, she became a linguist specializing in Arabic. Nearly 10 years later, married and pregnant with her daughter, Ireland turned to writing fiction. In 2015 she enrolled in the M.F.A. for Children's Literature at Hamline University, receiving her degree in 2017.
One of Ireland's primary goals as a black writer is to change publishing, especially its Children's and Young Adult divisions, making the industry more inclusive of writers of color. She wants, she says, to have young heroines look like her own daughter. As she told Publishers Weekly:
There are precious few Black girls living full and complex lives in children’s fiction..… And even when we get our own characters, their story is usually one of unmitigated suffering, as though the only narrative worth telling about Black people in America is one of tragedy.…
I wanted to write a story that would create space for Black boys and girls to exist. I want to expand the possibilities, so that everyone could see us as heroes in literature for a change.
Although publishers claim they want to do more regarding diversity—hiring more black editors and publishing more black authors—they have yet to do so. According to Vulture, in an industry where 80% of its editors are white, the barriers for black voices remains high. The proof is in the numbers: of the 3,700 kids' and YA books published in 2017 (the year before Dread Nation was released), 340 were about black children and teens; of those, only 100 were written by black authors.
Let's hope that Dread Nation and it's sequel will make a significant dent in that color barrier. (Adapted from various online sources. Retrieved 4/4/2018.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [A]lternate-history horror tale… First in a duology, Ireland’s gripping novel is teeming with monsters—most of them human. Abundant action, thoughtful worldbuilding, and a brave, smart, and skillfully drawn cast (Ages 14–Up).
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Slavery comes to a halt when the dead on Civil War battlefields begin to rise and eat their compatriots.… Ireland skillfully works in the different forms of enslavement, mental and physical, into a complex and engaging story (Gr. 9 & Up). —Desiree Thomas, Worthington Library, OH
School Library Journal
(Starred review.) Ireland delivers a necessary, subversive, and explosive novel with her fantasy-laced alternate history that does the all-important work of exploring topics of oppression, racism, and slavery whi…. Brilliant and gut-wrenching.
Booklist
(Starred review.) All the classic elements of the zombie novel are present, but Ireland takes the genre up a notch with her deft exploration of racial oppression…. With a shrewd, scythe-wielding protagonist of color …an exciting must-read (Ages 14-adult).
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 DREAD NATION … then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Jane?
2. What about Kate? In what way is she trapped—what is her figurative "imprisonment"? How does she serve as a literary foil for Jane?
3. Jane recognizes that some black people have internalized white racism:
Most of the white folks in the room are nodding and giving praise. I glance around the Negro tables and realize a few of those folks are as well. That makes me sad and scared.
What does Jane mean—how does what she witnesses make her "scared"?
4. Even though slavery has been abolished, white people continue to devise different ways of keeping people of color as slaves—like slavery, just without the title. What are the new forms of not-slavery in Dread Nation?
5. In what way does the book reflect our current society? Consider all the uncomfortable topics that white people would rather ignore and pretend do not exist. From prison systems, to Black Lives Matter, to systemic racism.
6. How are men, particularly white men, portrayed in this novel?
7. What do you think of Miss Preston's School. What are the reasons Jane feels lucky to be sent to that school in particular.
8. Do these words, from Summerland, sound familiar today?
Government pays to send them to those fancy schools while real mean like me are left to fend for ourselves. If it wasn’t for all that money going to educate [slur], we have better weapons to fight the undead, and better training for real men, too.
9. Talk also about the treatment of Native Americans in the novel. Does the novel conform to what you know of American Indians' actual history in the U.S.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Lost Night
Andrea Bartz, 2019
Crown/Archetype
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525574712
Summary
What really happened the night Edie died? Years later, her best friend Lindsay will learn how unprepared she is for the truth.
In 2009, Edie had New York’s social world in her thrall.
Mercurial and beguiling, she was the shining star of a group of recent graduates living in a Brooklyn loft and treating New York like their playground.
When Edie’s body was found near a suicide note at the end of a long, drunken night, no one could believe it. Grief, shock, and resentment scattered the group and brought the era to an abrupt end.
A decade later, Lindsay has come a long way from the drug-addled world of Calhoun Lofts. She has devoted best friends, a cozy apartment, and a thriving career as a magazine’s head fact-checker.
But when a chance reunion leads Lindsay to discover an unsettling video from that hazy night, she starts to wonder if Edie was actually murdered—and, worse, if she herself was involved.
As she rifles through those months in 2009—combing through case files, old technology, and her fractured memories—Lindsay is forced to confront the demons of her own violent history to bring the truth to light. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Andrea Bartz is a Brooklyn-based journalist and coauthor of the blog-turned-book Stuff Hipsters Hate, which The New Yorker called "depressingly astute."
Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Marie Claire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook, Elle, and many other outlets, and she's held editorial positions at Glamour, Psychology Today, and Self, among others. (From the publisher .)
Book Reviews
[A]ccomplished debut…. As the story hurtles toward its dramatic conclusion, Lindsay realizes she can’t trust anyone, especially not herself. Fans of psychological thrillers will want to see more from this talented newcomer.
Publishers Weekly
★ [A] captivating psychological suspense novel full of moving pieces and is expertly paced. The tension is unmatched as the pieces fall into place, but not without the protagonist second-guessing herself.… [A] whip-smart and mysterious read.
Library Journal
★ A riveting debut with, yes, an echo of The Girl on the Train.
Booklist
[A]s much a portrait of post-recession Brooklyn hipster ennui as it is a thriller… also a reminder of how insufferable hipsters could be.… Readers nostalgic for… Molly-fueled ragers should enjoy the world Bartz creates here; those looking for a terse thriller might turn elsewhere
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Lindsay begins investigating Edie’s death after her catch-up dinner with Sarah. Would you have done the same or let sleeping dogs lie? What do you make of Lindsay’s compulsion to dig into Edie’s old case after so much time had gone by?
2. What made Edie so enchanting to Lindsay and the other residents at Calhoun Lofts?
3. How do Lindsay’s scattered memories contribute to the story? Did you feel she was a reliable narrator?
4. Which of the characters did you feel most connected to?
5. Do you think Edie was a good friend?
6. Why do you think Lindsay isolated herself from the rest of the group after Edie’s death?
7. Calhoun Lofts becomes a character in the story as much as any of the other people. Describe the effect the book’s setting had on you.
8. What do you make of Lindsay’s friendship with Tessa?
9. When Lindsay reveals what really happened during the Warsaw Incident, we learn about one of her most shameful secrets. Did it change how you thought of her? Why?
10. As the narrator, Lindsay is constantly picking apart and commenting on the social dynamics at play around her—trying to understand people’s motivations and intentions. Did you find that commentary relatable? What did it tell you about her character?
11. As Lindsay compares everyone’s recollections of what happened in 2009, she realizes there are many different interpretations of the same reality. Have you ever remembered a shared experience very differently from someone else? What happened?
12. Were you surprised by the ending? What did you think had actually happened to Edie?
13. Throughout the narrative, technology serves as both a memory aid and a marker for how different things are today vs. ten years ago. How do you use technology to document your life? How would you feel if, ten years from now, you could no longer access the photos and posts you took today?
14. The Lost Night is set in the present but centers on Lindsay’s life as a twentysomething, when she was out on her own with a new set of friends for the first time. How does her experience compare to that period in your life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Gifted
John Daniel, 2017
Counterpoint Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781619029200
Summary
Henry Fielder, solitary and unmoored in his thirties, runs into an old lover and finds himself ready to tell the story he has harbored for two decades.
He is fifteen, in rural western Oregon, enduring a year of sorrows. His mother has died, his father is physically abusive, and his extraordinary spiritual affinity for the wild lives of his native country seems to desert him. An older couple, retiring to the area from California, offer solace and expanded cultural horizons but set him further at odds with his millworker father.
The abuse escalates, and ultimately a natural disaster catalyzes a crisis in which father and son betray each othe. Henry sets out on a trek through the backcountry of the Oregon Coast Range, seeking to understand what has happened and to forge a new sense of self.
A Huck Finn of the modern age, Henry is portrayed with a directness and clarity that pulls readers through the environmental dynamics of the Pacific Northwest.
In stark yet beautiful prose that highlights his long tenure as a nature writer, Daniel creates an odyssey that explores the spiritual dimensions and deeply entangled pains and pleasures of belonging to the human domain and the natural world of which it is part.
Set in the mid-1990s, when environmentalists and timber communities warred over the future of the last Northwestern old-growth forests, Gifted is the story of a young man with a metaphysical imagination—naïve yet wise, gifted yet ordinary—who comes of age under harsh circumstances, negotiating the wildness of his home country, of his human relationships, and of the emerging complexities of his own being. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—State of South Carolina, USA
• Raised—near Washington, D.C.
• Education—Reed College (no degree); M.A., Stanford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives near Eugen, Oregon
John Daniel is an American poet, essayist, memoirist, novelist and teacher. In all, he has written some 10 books, most recently his 2017 debut novel, Gifted.
Daniel was born in South Carolina, raised outside of Washington, D.C., and in 1966 attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He dropped out of Reed but stayed in the West. spending the next 24 years as a logger, railroad inspector, and climbing instructor, among other jobs.
During all that time, Daniel was writing poetry, and in 1982 he won the prestigious Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. He remained at Stanford to earn his M.A. and for the next five years taught Poetry and freshman English.
He now earns a living writing, as well as teaching—in workshops and writer-in-residence programs around the country.
Writing
In addition to his novel, Gifted, Daniel has published a book of essays, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature (2009); Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone (2005), part journal and part memoir; Winter Creek: One Writer’s Natural History (2002); and Looking After: A Son’s Memoir (1996), about caring for his dying mother.
He has also published three volumes of poetry — Of Earth: New and Selected Poems (2012), All Things Touched by Wind (1994), and Common Ground (1988).
His work can be found in Audubon, Outside, Southwest Review, Western American Literature, Portland Magazine, Open Spaces, Oregon Humanities, Orion, and in more than 20 textbooks and anthologies.
Recognition
Daniel's poetry has won him a Pushcart Prize, John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, three Oregon Book Awards, and a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.
In addition to the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, he has also been selected for the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, a Research and Writing Fellowship from Oregon State University’s Center for the Humanities, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He has served as chair of PEN Northwest, serves as a judge for, or on the boards of, various literary organizations. He lives with his wife in the Coast Range foothills, west of Eugene, Oregon. (Adapted from the author's bio.)
Book Reviews
“Sunrise and sunset are made of the same light, and, like gladness and sadness, you can’t have one without the other.” These words arise in the mind of Henry Fielder at the age of 16. Think he might be an old soul? Yes, oh yes. His beloved mother dies when he is 15. Then later his father kicks the bucket when a tree falls on their house in rural western Oregon. If that plotline sounds like a formulaic YA premise, don’t go there. This novel runs deep. Henry is one of those kids who doesn’t talk much, who walks the woods in wonder. Woodland creatures who usually bolt away from humans instead step closer to Henry and they share spirit. That is his gift and those are the moments Henry lives for. READ MORE …
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers
Daniel explores an ecology of natives and invasives — plant and animal — while rendering clear-cuts and second-growth forests with the same keen eye for beauty as he does towering old growths.… His protagonist spends much of the book avoiding truths small and large…but the novel is most intriguing when Daniel pits dishonesty between his characters, not between writer and reader. In justifying the writing, Daniel undermines the terrifying and humbling aspects of his remarkable story — reasons enough to write it.
Marc Bojanowski - New York Times Book Review
[E]loquent.… [Daniel's] digressions about the landscape mirror Henry’s own attempts to find solace in an unjust, confusing world. Daniel’s impressive novel quietly builds, ending in a place where Henry can see the way…into a much more beautiful, logical future.
Publishers Weekly
Lyrical evocations of nature clash with shocking revelations of human nature in this coming-of-age story set in and around the deep woods of western Oregon in the 1990s.… An insightful though rambling stroll through the wilderness of adolescence and the Oregon woods.
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 Gifted … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about Henry's Fielder's childhood--his mother's death and his father's abusive behavior. How has so much sorrow and hardship in Henry's young life affected him?
2. In what way does the beauty of the natural world offer solace to the boy? Do you ever—or frequently—turn to nature to find comfort, release, or repose?
3. Talk about this passage: "Sunrise and sunset are made of the same light, and, like gladness and sadness, you can’t have one without the other.” Select other passages you find evocative or poignant or insightful in how they capture Henry's isolation and loneliness.
4. Henry also turns to the stories of native Americans that his mother loved. How do those lift him up? What does he find in them?
5.Consider the the way in which Henry seems haunted by the presence of his parents, first his mother, later his father. Are what he experiences dreams…or visions? In what way do they seem to heal? Is Henry a sort of shamanistic figure (someone who accesses an altered state of reality —a trance, perhaps— in order to interact with the spiritual world)?
6. What about Henry as a student—he's not a particularly "good" one. Yet he loves "biologycosmologyphilosophyreli
7. Talk about the role that Carter and Josie Stephens play in Henry's life. Also discuss the Sweet Grass Confederacy and it's role. How would you describe the commune?
8. Henry admits that he sometimes plays fast and lose with the truth in his retelling. Where is his story unreliable, and why does he admit to deception?
9. How did you experience the violence at the heart of the novel? Too much? Sensational? Or done purely in the service of the story?
10. What is the meaning of the novel's title? What does "gifted" mean in the context of the story?
11. Where you caught off guard by the twist and the end of the novel involving Lynn?
12. Is the ending of the novel hopeful?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, oneline or off, with attribution. Thanks.)