The Diary of a Bookseller
Shaun Bythell, 2017
Profile Books, Ltd.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781781258620
Summary
Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown — Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea.
A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost …
In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky.
He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books (both lost classics and new discoveries), introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1970
• Where—Wigtown, Scotland, UK
• Education—Trinity College, Dublin
• Currently—lives in Wigtown, Scotland
Shaun Bythell is a Scotish bookseller and the author of the memoir, The Diary of a Bookseller (2017). Bythell was raised in Wigtown (Galloway), Scotland, where his father was a farmer. He remembers the bookstore he now owns opening in the 1980s and thinking it wouldn't survive. He went away to Trinity College, eventually leaving Trinity without his intended law degree. From there, as he puts it, he bummed "about for a bit," doing some work laying pipelines, then as a researcher for TV documentaries — neither job he envisioned himself spending the rest of his life on.
Eventually, in 2001, Bythell returned to his hometown, wandered into the bookshop he watched open in the '80s, and learned it was for sale. Now, the very bookshop he thought wouldn't survive is his, and it's up to him to try to make sure it does. (Adapted from The Herald.)
Book Reviews
Bythell is a true believer, who makes a passionate case for the importance of books — real, paper-and-board books, yellowed by time and handled, smudged and annotated by generations. This is, after all, a man who shot a Kindle and wall-mounted it — and after reading his wonderfully entertaining book, I’m just about ready to follow suit.
Alice O'Keeffe - Guardian
Warm, witty and laugh-out-loud funny, this gently meandering tale of British eccentricity will stay long in the memory.
Daily Mail
The Diary Of A Bookseller is warm (unlike Bythell's freezing-cold shop) and funny, and deserves to become one of those bestsellers that irritate him so much.
Jon Dennis - Mail on Sunday
Peopled with fascinating characters ... a sarcastic reminder of the struggles of small business ownership, the importance of community and the frustration of dealing with customers ... occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
Herald (Scotland)
Wonderfully entertaining.
Observer
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 Diary of a Bookseller … then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Shaun Bythell? Does "grumpy old man" hit the mark? Is he truly a curmudgeon? Or, given the customers he deals with on a daily basis, does he have reason to be a tad acerbic?
2. Talk about Bythell's customers. What about those who seemingly spend hours among the shelves but never purchase a book? Or the ones who threaten to go home and buy a title online? Do you see yourself in some of those people? Given Bythell's less-than-flattering descriptions, would you have the courage to walk through his door?
3. Speaking of buying books online, discuss the economics of the bookselling trade — especially the power that Amazon and other large chain stores have vis-a-vis smaller, independent brick & mortar shops.
4. Given the seemingly never ending challenges his bookstore faces (i.e., difficult customers and difficult economics), why does Bythell continue? He says he loves his work? What specifically does he love?
5. What is Bythell's case for books, the paper and ink kind, over digital readers?
6. What curious fact about the book trade surprises you most: that first editions are not usually all that valuable, for instance, or that people who ask about Bibles, never buy them? What about men and railway books?
7. "On the whole (in my shop at least) the majority of fiction is still bought by women, while men rarely buy anything other than nonfiction." Care to make a comment? Perhaps things are different in the US than the UK? What about spy thrillers: do men read them more frequently than women do?
8. What does Bythell have to say about the long-term survival of books and bookshops? What does he see as the future of the book trade? What do you see?
9. What do you think of Bythell's staff? Who do you find more endearing … or amusing?
10. Talk about how Bythell sources his bookstore — about the auctions and estate sales he attends.
11. What incidents or passages or quips do you find especially funny in The Diary of a Bookseller?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War
Pamela D. Toler, 2016
Little, Brown & Company
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316392068
Summary
The true stories of the real nurses on the PBS show Mercy Street
The nurses of the Civil War ushered in a new era for medicine in the midst of tremendous hardship. While the country was at war, these women learned to advocate and care for patients in hostile settings, saved countless lives, and changed the profession forever
But they regularly fell ill with no one to nurse them in return, seethed in anger at the indifference and inefficiency that left wounded men on the battlefield without care, and all too often mourned for those they could not rescue.
Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, hotel turned wartime hospital and setting for the PBS show Mercy Street. Women like Dorothea Dix, Mary Phinney, Anne Reading, and more rushed to be of service to their country during the war, meeting challenges that would discourage less determined souls every step of the way. They saw casualties on a scale Americans had never seen before; diseases like typhoid and dysentery were rampant; and working conditions-both physically and emotionally—were abysmal.
Drawing on the diaries, letters, and books written by these nursing pioneers, Pamela D. Toler, PhD, has written a fascinating portrait of true heroines, shining a light on their personal contributions during one of our country's most turbulent periods. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1958
• Where—state of Missouri, USA (?)
• Education—B.A., Carlton College; Ph,D, University of Chicago
• Currently—Chicago, Illinois, USA
Pamela D. Toler is an American history writer, the author of Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War (2016). It is the companion book to PBS's Mercey Street, a dramatic series about the nurses during the Civil War. She is also the author of Mankind: The Story of all of Us (2012) and The Everything Guide to Socialism (2011).
Toler has loved history from the time she was a young girl, quickly swapping our histories and biographies from her school library as soon as a new one would come in. By the time she reached high school, according to Toler, she was the class nerd who "hung out at the local historical society."
From high school, she went on to Carlton College in Minnesota to earn her B.A., and then to the University of Chicago where she attained both her M.A. and Ph.D. in history. In a History News Network interview, Robin Lindley referred to Toler as a "wide-ranging historian and writer." She has tackled subjects ranging from a book on Matt Damon or on socialism to articles on mosquito-borne diseases (Time magazine) and the first European translation of "Arabian Nights."
As she told writing coach Marla Beck, she wants to show the reverse side of history:
I'm committed to telling the historical stories that let my readers see the world from a different perspective. Not just "wow, I didn’t know that," but "wow, I never thought about that."
Before turning to writing full-time, Toler spent 25 years in property management, eventually becoming vice president and part-owner of a firm. It wasn't until she realized how much her corporate work took time away from her writing that she finally decided to devote herself full-time to history and writing.
Her project with PBS began with an email: the network was searching for someone to write the companion book for Mercy Street. The series, about Civil War nurses in Union-held Alexandria, Virginia, was still in development, but Toler said the time frame was tight. She turned to secondary sources, many by the historians who had advised the producers/writers early on. She also used primary sources — letters and diaries to help her flesh out the story. (Adapted from various online sources.)
Read the complete Historian News Network interview with the author.
Book Reviews
Dr. Toler delves into the medical consequences of the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history that left 750,000 troops dead — more than twice the number of American troops killed in World War II and two percent of the population in the 1860s. If a similar number of Americans died in a war today, the toll would reach about 7.5 million. Hundreds of thousands more troops were wounded or seriously ill. As Dr. Toler writes, women stepped into the fray and at least twenty thousand volunteered to serve in capacities related to medicine from nurses to laundresses to hospital staff, including about six thousand Union Army nurses, many under the command of renowned reformer Dorothea Dix, the Superintendent of Army Nurses.
Robin Lindley - History News Network
Accessible and well researched, Toler's book coincides with the recent PBS series Mercy Street and successfully illustrates the beginnings of nursing as a designated field of medical practice. —Rebecca Hill, Zionsville, IN
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
The following questions were graciously offered to LitLovers by Angela Scott, Program Coordinator, Ligonier Library. Thanks, Angela.
1. Did the book create a new set of expectations for you in what a Civil War nurse truly was? Many might previously have the image of an older woman that comes from middle to upper class families and wish to work towards philanthropy, but in reality, they came from a diverse background. How did your expectations of these women change as you read through the book?
2. What did you think of Dorothea Dix and her attempt to create an army of nurses? Was she successful? Did you feel her own preconceived notions limited the nursing field? What did you think of the men that attempted to control her and limit her power?
3. Did you have a concept of how overwhelming the wounded would have been to doctors and nurses who had little training and no real organization to fall back on, especially at the start of the war?
4. Most men were extremely hostile to the nurses when they first working with military. How did this change by the end of the war and how did the women earn their respect?
5. The women felt their duty towards the soldiers was more than just tending wounds. How did they see their roles in relation to their patients?
6. Do you feel that the nurses finally got the recognition that they deserved? By the end of the war? Years later?
7. How did the war change the way women seen themselves? Like during many wars, women were forced to step into the roles of what had primarily been male. Did this give them more power and how did that change them later after the war ended?
8. Was there a story that stuck out for you as a reader or you identified with?
(Questions courtesy of Angela Scott, Ligoniere Library. Please feel free to use online or off, with attribution to both Angela and LitLovers. Thanks..)
Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
Amy Tan, 2017
Ecco Books
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062319296
Summary
In Where the Past Begins, Amy Tan reveals herself in a way she never has before, delving into her childhood, adolescence, family history, beginnings as a writer and professional life to explore the answers to questions of purpose and meaning that we all ask ourselves as we get older.
Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal-writing and travelling.
Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer.
With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist’s fiction. Interspersed with direct correspondence between the author and her editor, the book will give fans and critics unparalleled insight into the author’s process, her thoughts on the literary enterprise, and her singularly warm, intelligent mind. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Also named—En-Mai Tan
• Birth—February 15, 1952
• Where—Oakland, California, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., San Jose State University
• Currently—San Francisco, California
Amy Tan is a Chinese-American writer, many of whose works explore mother-daughter relationships. Her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989) brought her fame and has remained one of her most popular works. It was adapted to film in 1993.
Early yeaars
Tan is the second of three children born to Chinese immigrants John and Daisy Tan. Her father was an electrical engineer and Baptist minister who traveled to the US to escape the Chinese Revolution. Although she was born in Oakland, California, her family moved a number of times throughout her childhood.
When she was fifteen, her father and older brother Peter both died of brain tumors within six months of each other. Tan subsequently moved with her mother and younger brother, John Jr., to Switzerland, where she finished high school at the Institut Monte Rosa in Montreux.
It was during this period that Tan learned about her mother's previous marriage in China, where she had four children (a son who died in toddlerhood and three daughters). Her mother had left her husband and children behind in Shanghai — an incident that became the basis for Tan's first novel, The Joy Luck Club. In 1987, she and her mother traveled to China to meet her three half-sisters for the first time.
Tan enrolled at Linfield College in Oregon, a Baptist college of her mother's choosing. After she dropped out to follow her boyfriend to San Jose City College in California, she and her mother stopped speaking for six months. Tan ended up marrying the young man in 1974 and subsequently earned both her B.A. and M.A. in English and linguistics from San Jose State University. She began her doctoral studies in linguistics at University of California-Santa Cruz and Berkeley, but abandoned them in 1976.
Career
While in school, Tan worked odd jobs — serving as a switchboard operator, carhop, bartender, and pizza maker. Eventually, she started writing freelance for businesses, working on projects for AT&T, IBM, Bank of America, and Pacific Bell, writing under non-Chinese-sounding pseudonyms.
In 1985, she turned to fiction, publishing her first story in 1986 in a small literary journal. It was later reprinted in Seventeen magazine and Grazia. On her return from the China trip with her mmother, where she had met her half-sisters, Tan learned her agent had signed a contract for a book of short stories, only three of which were written. That book eventually became The Joy Luck Club and launchd Tan's literary career.
Extras
In addition to her novels (see below), Tan has written two children's books: The Moon Lady (1992) and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat (1994), which was turned into an animated series airing on PBS. She has also appeared on PBS in a short spot encouraging children to write.
Tan is a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band consisting of published writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King, among others. In 1994 she co-wrote, with the other band members, Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America With Three Chords and an Attitude.
In 1998, Tan contracted Lyme disease, which went undiagnosed for a few years. As a result, she suffers from epileptic seizures due to brain lesions. Tan co-founded LymeAid 4 Kids, which helps uninsured children pay for treatment, and wrote about her life with Lyme disease in a 2013 op-ed piece in the New York Times.
Tan is still married to the guy she ran off with from Linfield College and married in 1974. He is Louis DeMattei, a lawyer, and the two live in San Francisco.
Books
1989 - The Joy Luck Club
1991 - The Kitchen God's Wife
1995 - The Hundred Secret Senses
2001 - The Bonesetter's Daughter
2003 - The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (Essays)
2005 - Saving Fish from Drowning
2013 - The Valley of Amazement
2017 - Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)
Book Reviews
In this wise and profound memoir, novelist Tan, now 65, looks back on her life, illuminating the path that led her to writing. Tan’s fans and writers of all kinds will find her latest work fascinating.
Publishers Weekly
[Tan's] new book digs deeper [than The Opposite of Fate], revealing more about he difficult childhood, her … relationship with her father, family secrets, and how all these experiences led inevitably to her becoming a writer.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) In her…revealing memoir, beloved novelist Tan chronicles with striking candor, sharp wit, and storytelling magic stranger-than-fiction traumas.… A profound work of endless fascination, discovery, and compassion.
Booklist
Tan's candid revelations make much of the book entertaining, but the slight journal entries and short pieces she calls "quirks" read like filler, and many chapters would have benefited from further editing. A composite portrait that should appeal to the author's fans.
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 start a discussion for Where the Past Begins … then take off on your own:
1. The subtitle of Amy Tan's book is "A Writer's Memoir," but its structure feels like something different — a collage, perhaps, with letters to her editor, an essay written when she was 14, a drawing from age 12, and so-called "interludes" and "quirks." What was your experience reading Where the Past Begins? Do you consider it a memoir … or something else? Did it's fragmentary nature distract from your enjoyment? Or did you find the fragments enjoyable?
2. What does the book reveal about the path or inspirations that led Tan to become a writer? Mary Karr, a friend of Tan and the author of both Lit (2009) and Art of a Memoir (2015), says that Tan is "an interesting person because she is both tortured and happy." What role, in particular, does personal family trauma play in Tan's writing career?
3. Talk about the letters Tan and her editor exchange. How would you describe their relationship? What do those letters suggest, if anything, about the role an editor plays in shaping a writer's career and/or works?
4. Talk about the family secrets that Tan has revealed in Where the Past Begins. She has said she worries that other family members might feel she has gone too far. What do you think about authors who mine family background for artistic reasons? Many, if not most, authors do. Fair? Unfair?
5. Tan traces her participation as a youngster in a psychological experiment about early childhood readers. How did that experience reveal her parents' expectations for her? What half-truths did they tell Tan? Years later, when Tan located the mystery woman who administered the tests, according to Tan, "She had said exactly what I needed to hear." What was the revelation and why was it so powerful (Tan later told an interviewer that she "heard it through tears")?
6. Talk about Tan's mother and also their relationship with one another — a relationship that has been central to Tan's writing.
7. Tan writes that "While writing this memoir, I was conscious that much of what I think I remember is inaccurate, guessed at, or biased by experience that came later." How much of anyone's memory is accurate and/or reliable? What about your own? What affect does Tan's acknowledgment about the frailty of her own memories have on your reading of Where the Past Begins? Is she a trustworthy recorder of her own life?
7. Tan considers the role of music in her life and in her writing. Discuss the comparison she makes of writing to jazz improvisation.
8. What do you find most surprising, maybe even shocking, about Tan's life: her mother's prior secret life in China, her mother's attempt to throw herself out of the family car, her father's and brother's deaths, her own battle with Lyme disease? Something else?
9. Talk about the book's title: what does it mean? Where does the past begin in Amy Tan's life?
(Questions from LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
How to Be an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi, 2019
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525509288
Summary
Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other.
At it's core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types.
Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves.
In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilites—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their posionous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.
Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 13, 1982
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Florida A & M; Ph.D., Temple University
• Awards—National Book Award
• Currently—lives in Wasihngton, D.C.
Ibram X. Kendi is a New York Times bestselling author and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.
A professor of history and international relations and a frequent public speaker, Kendi is a columnist at The Atlantic. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize.
Kendi lives in Washington, D.C. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[A]nother stunner of a book that is in some ways [Kendi's] previous work’s natural counterpart…. Kendi offers up a wrenching examination of the evolution of his [own racism]…. While acknowledging the reality of racism in contemporary life, Kendi wants to free us from using tainted ideas to stigmatize people and support policies that define others as inferior…. What emerges from these insights is the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind, a confessional of self-examination that may, in fact, be our best chance to free ourselves from our national nightmare.
New York Times Book Review
Kendi… displays an admirable independence and candor. Though he situates himself far to the left among black activist intellectuals, he is unafraid to say things likely to singe the sensibilities of many of his potential followers…. Kendi’s book suffers, alas, from major flaws.… In the most obtuse pages, Kendi condemns standardized testing, disparages the significance of what should be alarming racial patterns in academic achievement gaps…. His polemic is littered with misleading red herrings, as when he says that implicit in the idea of academic achievement gaps, as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates, is a conviction that the qualities measured by such criteria constitute the only form of academic "achievement’'… Despite misgivings about various features of How to Be an Antiracist, we should fervently hope to see more work from Kendi in the months and years to come.
Washington Post
(Starred review) [A] boldly articulated, historically informed explanation of what exactly racist ideas and thinking are…. His prose is thoughtful, sincere, and polished. This powerful book will spark many conversations.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [A] sharp blend of social commentary and memoir…. [Kendi offers] potent explorations of race, gender, colorism, and more… [and] his willingness to turn the lens on himself marks him as a courageous activist, leading the way to a more equitable society.
Library Journal
[S]ome terms are confusing and feel labored…. And his descriptions of his life… seem structured to set himself up as proof of his sociological declaratives…. Kendi does… inspire readers to consider whether ignorance or self-interest drives racist policies into reality.
Booklist
(Starred review) Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth…. This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory. Not an easy read but an essential one.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado, 2019
Graywolf Press
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781644450031
Summary
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties,
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles.
She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.
Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction.
The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1986
• Where—Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., American University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Gpuggenheim Fellowshi
• Currently—lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the story collection, Her Body and Other Parties (2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives with her wife in Philadelphia, Penna., where she is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Each chapter hews to the conventions of a different genre: road trip, romance novel, creature feature, lesbian pulp novel, stoner comedy.… What could seem gimmicky… quickly feels like the only natural way to tell the story of a couple. What relationship exists in purely one genre? What life?…There is something anxious, and very intriguing…. The flurry—the excess—feels deliberate, and summons up the image of the writer holding a ring of keys, trying each of them in turn to unlock a resistant story, to open a door she might be hesitant to enter.
New York Times - Parul Sehgal
A stunning book, both deeply felt and elegantly written.
Boston Globe
[In the Dream House] is a genre-bending, formally inventive, generous memoir that adds both documentation to the archive as well as a work of art to be admired…. Machado’s memoir adds something vital to the canon of queer history…. Above everything else, this book is a gift to the reader, to anyone suffering in violence that is hard to prove or name, and people looking for ways to tell their stories that have few or no precedents.
San Francisco Chronicle
Piercing…. In the Dream House makes for uneasy but powerful reading.
USA Today
Breathtakingly inventive…. Machado’s writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality. But what makes In the Dream House a particularly self-aware structure—which is to say, a true haunted house—is the intimation that it is critiquing itself in real time.… Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming.
New Yorker
In the Dream House is the kind of book that burrows under the reader's skin while simultaneously forcing her to inhabit the body of the writer.
NPR.org
In the Dream House—a book that manages to break open nearly everything we think we know about abuse memoirs… The result is a gorgeously kaleidoscopic feat—not just of literature but of pure, uncut humanity.
Entertainment Weekly
A tour-de-force meditation on trauma, survival and the language we use to talk about it all (Best Books of 2019).
Time
[A] dizzying, dazzling amalgamation of memoir and criticism.
Vanity Fair
Carmen Maria Machado is as much alchemist as author.… In this brainy, playful, shattering account, Machado ultimately tells her own singular tale.
Oprah Magazine
(Starred review) [H]aunting…. Machado interestingly weaves in cultural references… as she considers portrayals of abuse.… The author eventually leaves her toxic relationship behind, but scars remain.… [A]n affecting, chilling memoir about domestic abuse.
Publishers Weekly
In this open examination of abuse—how it starts, how it hides, how it tears at the victim’s sense of self—Machado reimagines and plays with the memoir form, bridging the gap between reader and author in a way that is original and haunting. —Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami
Library Journal
(Starred review) [Machado’s] writing exhibits all of the formal precision of her fiction, and the book draws the reader deep into the varied rooms of the haunted house of the past. Highly recommended.a
Booklist
(Starred review) [A] daringly structured and ruthlessly inquisitive memoir…. [Machado] applies the astonishing force of her imagination and narrative skill to her own life…. A fiercely honest, imaginatively written, and necessary memoir from one of our great young writers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)