January 2014 Book- Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Oprah with Cheryl Strayed, author of Book Club 2.0's inaugural selection, Wild.

Our January 2015 book, picked by Cass, will be: "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail" by Cheryl Strayed.

From Author Cheryl Strayed

I wrote the last line of my first book, Torch, and then spent an hour crying while lying on a cool tile floor in a house on a hot Brazilian island. After I finished my second book, Wild, I walked alone for miles under a clear blue sky on an empty road in the Oregon Outback. I sat bundled in my coat on a cold patio at midnight staring up at the endless December stars after completing my third book, Tiny Beautiful Things. There are only a handful of other days in my life--my wedding, the births of my children--that I remember as vividly as those solitary days on which I finished my books. The settings and situations were different, but the feeling was the same: an overwhelming mix of joy and gratitude, humility and relief, pride and wonder. After much labor, I'd made this thing. A book. Though it wasn't technically that yet.

The real book came later--after more work, but this time it involved various others, including agents, publishers, editors, designers, and publicists, all of whose jobs are necessary but sometimes indecipherable to me. They're the ones who transformed the thousands of words I'd privately and carefully conjured into something that could be shared with other people. "I wrote this!" I exclaimed in amazement when I first held each actual, physical book in my hands. I wasn't amazed that it existed; I was amazed by what its existence meant: that it no longer belonged to me.

Two months before Wild was published I stood on a Mexican beach at sunset with my family assisting dozens of baby turtles on their stumbling journey across the sand, then watching as they disappeared into the sea. The junction between writer and author is a bit like that. In one role total vigilance is necessary; in the other, there's nothing to do but hope for the best. A book, like those newborn turtles, will ride whatever wave takes it.

It's deeply rewarding to me when I learn that something I wrote moved or inspired or entertained someone; and it's crushing to hear that my writing bored or annoyed or enraged another. But an author has to stand back from both the praise and the criticism once a book is out in the world. The story I chose to write in Wild for no other reason than I felt driven to belongs to those who read it, not me. And yet I'll never forget what it once was, long before I could even imagine how gloriously it would someday be swept away from me.

From Booklist

Echoing the ever-popular search for wilderness salvation by Chris McCandless (Back to the Wild, 2011) and every other modern-day disciple of Thoreau, Strayed tells the story of her emotional devastation after the death of her mother and the weeks she spent hiking the 1,100-mile Pacific Crest Trail. As her family, marriage, and sanity go to pieces, Strayed drifts into spontaneous encounters with other men, to the consternation of her confused husband, and eventually hits rock bottom while shooting up heroin with a new boyfriend. Convinced that nothing else can save her, she latches onto the unlikely idea of a long solo hike. Woefully unprepared (she fails to read about the trail, buy boots that fit, or pack practically), she relies on the kindness and assistance of those she meets along the way, much as McCandless did. Clinging to the books she lugs along—Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich—Strayed labors along the demanding trail, documenting her bruises, blisters, and greater troubles. Hiker wannabes will likely be inspired. Experienced backpackers will roll their eyes. But this chronicle, perfect for book clubs, is certain to spark lively conversation. --Colleen Mondor

Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2012: At age 26, following the death of her mother, divorce, and a run of reckless behavior, Cheryl Strayed found herself alone near the foot of the Pacific Crest Trail--inexperienced, over-equipped, and desperate to reclaim her life. Wild tracks Strayed's personal journey on the PCT through California and Oregon, as she comes to terms with devastating loss and her unpredictable reactions to it. While readers looking for adventure or a naturalist's perspective may be distracted by the emotional odyssey at the core of the story, Wild vividly describes the grueling life of the long-distance hiker, the ubiquitous perils of the PCT, and its peculiar community of wanderers. Others may find her unsympathetic--just one victim of her own questionable choices. But Strayed doesn't want sympathy, and her confident prose stands on its own, deftly pulling both threads into a story that inhabits a unique riparian zone between wilderness tale and personal-redemption memoir. --Jon Foro

More about Celeste Ng

From her Publisher's web site:

A CONVERSATION WITH CELESTE NG

What compelled you to write this book?
My stories almost always begin with images—in this case, the image of a young girl falling into deep water. I started writing to figure out how she got there: Was she pushed? Did she slip? Did she jump? As I wrote my way into the book, I discovered it was a story about not just the girl but about her family, her family’s history, and everything in her life that had led her to this point and about whether (and how) her family would be able to go on. What seemed like the end of the story actually turned out to be the center.

The discovery of Lydia’s death spurs so many questions for her family. How did you approach writing about loss and grief?
When you lose someone you love, especially suddenly, there’s immense regret and immense self-doubt. It’s impossible not to ask yourself questions: Could you have saved them in some way? Could you, by leaving five minutes later or arriving a day earlier or saying just the right words, have changed what happened? Inevitably, you reconsider and reassess the relationship you had with that person, and it can be hardest if that relationship was strained. James, Marilyn, Nath, and Hannah each feel a lot of guilt about their relationships with Lydia—and the ways that, deep down, they know they’ve pressured, disappointed, or failed her—and that complicates their reactions to her death. Any act of writing is an act of empathy: You try to imagine yourself into another person’s mind and skin. I tried to ask myself the questions the characters would have asked themselves.

The relationships between the siblings—Nath, Lydia, and Hannah—are immediately recognizable and so well drawn. They love one another, but they also get angry, jealous, and confused and take it out on one another. Can you speak to their dynamics? Did you draw on your own childhood?
Sibling relationships are fascinating: You have the same parents and grow up alongside each other, yet more often than not, siblings are incredibly different from one another and have incredibly different experiences even within the same family. You share so much that you feel you should understand one another completely, yet of course there’s also enough distance between you that that’s almost never the case. It gets even more complicated when one sibling is clearly the favorite in the family. The family constellation can get really skewed when one star shines much brighter than the rest.
My own sister is eleven years older than I am. Because she was so much older, we never really fought; I actually think our relationship was stronger because we weren’t close in age. At the same time, though, I missed her terribly when I was seven and she went off to college—that informed Lydia’s feelings of abandonment when Nath heads to Harvard. And I always idolized my sister; there’s definitely an aspect of that in Hannah’s relationship with Lydia.

You began writing the book before you had your son. How did becoming a parent affect your approach to your characters and their stories, especially James and Marilyn?
Even before I had children, I often found myself focusing on parents and children in my fiction. Yourrelationship with your parents is maybe the most fundamental and the most powerful, even morethan friendship or romantic love. It’s the first relationship you ever have, and it’s probably the greatestsingle influence on your outlook and the kind of person you become. Most of us spend our lives eithertrying to live up to our parents’ ideals or actively rebelling against them.
When I started writing the novel—having never been a parent—I definitely identified morewith the children, especially Lydia. After my son was born, though, I became much more sympatheticto Marilyn and James. I started to understand how deeply parents want the best for their childrenand how that desire can sometimes blind you to what actually is best. This isn’t to say that I “switchedsides,” only that becoming a parent made my perspective more balanced, I think, and made the bookmore nuanced. Now I identify with the parents at least as much as I identify with the children.

The book is set in Ohio in the 1970s. You grew up in Pennsylvania and Ohio—how did your time there inform the book?
Both of the small suburbs I grew up in—first outside Pittsburgh, then outside Cleveland—had a small-town feel. My first elementary school was tiny, one of those schools where the gym is also the cafeteria and the auditorium, and on my street the neighbor kids all played together. But more than that, I remember a distinct sense of restlessness in the air while I was growing up, a feeling that if you wanted an exciting or important or interesting life, you needed to escape. Pittsburgh in the 1980s and Cleveland in the early 1990s were depressed and depressing places: a lot of closed factories, a lot of tension and unemployment, a lot of rust. So I knew the kind of insulated, almost suffocated feeling teenagers like Nath and Lydia—and even adults like James and Marilyn—might have, the feeling that the place you’re in is too small.

Through all members of the Lee family, you write touchingly and perceptively about feeling like an outsider and being measured against stereotypes and others’ perceptions. Can you discuss your personal experience and how you approached these themes in the book?
My parents came to the U.S. from Hong Kong and moved straight into the Midwest: Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Most of the time I was growing up, we were virtually the only Asians in the community. In my school in Pittsburgh, for instance, I was one of two nonwhite girls, and the only Asian, in all four grades. Like most Asian Americans, my family experienced some outright discrimination: Once, neighborhood kids put cherry bombs in our mailbox; another time, a man got in our faces while we were waiting at a bus stop, spitting at us and telling us, “Go back to Vietnam or Korea or wherever the hell you came from.”
More insidious than those moments of outright hostility, though, and maybe more powerful are the constant low-level reminders that you’re different. Many of us feel different in some way, but it’s really jarring when one of your differences is obvious at a glance—other people can tell you’re different simply by looking at you. (It’s hard to explain just how strange that is if you’ve never experienced it. My husband and I had talked about it many times, but he didn’t really know what it felt like until we went to Hong Kong and he—a very tall white man—was surrounded by thousands of Asians.) Even when you feel like you belong, other people’s reactions—even stares and offhand remarks—can make you feel that you don’t, startlingly often. I drew on that to imagine the experiences of James, Lydia, Nath, and Hannah, or at least their reactions to those experiences. In terms of actual encounters, I didn’t have to imagine much: They all came from life, from the girls who throw rocks at James’s car, to the people who speak to you slower and louder as if you might not understand English, to the woman in the grocery store who proudly identifies the children as Chinese before pulling her eyes into slits.
In the novel, though, I didn’t want to explore just racial difference. There are all kinds of ways of feeling like an outsider. For example, my mother is a chemist and my sister is a scientist—both women in heavily male-dominated fields—and I often feel like an outsider or an impostor myself: Am I smart enough/experienced enough/insert-adjective-here enough? All of the characters grapple with some version of that feeling.

Marilyn is deeply conflicted about being a homemaker and wanting to finish her degree and achieving more in her professional life. What did you seek to explore through her desires and decisions?
This is a long-standing question that most women face: How do you balance a family and a professional life of your own? I struggle with this myself, as does every other woman I know, and Marilyn’s situation is a magnified version. It’s striking to remember that in her time—just a generation ago—she had so many fewer paths open to her. But even with more options, we haven’t gotten this figured out yet, either. We’re still actively wrestling with the question of balance and women’s roles. Look at the tremendous interest in Lean In and the uproar over Anne-Marie Slaughter’s essay in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Recently a Princeton alumna wrote an essay telling young female grads that the most important thing to do in college was to find a husband. Many women were outraged—but she’s also just published a book. The debate over what women can and should do goes on.

You grew up in a family of scientists. What compelled you to become a writer? How did that shape how you approach writing?
I was always interested in stories—reading them, making them up, telling them to my parents and friends. There’s an argument for nature over nurture right there! But actually, there’s more overlap between science and writing than you’d expect. Scientists are really interested in figuring out how the world works and why things happen the way they do. A science experiment is really a what-if: “Hmm, what if I put these things together under these conditions?” I do the same thing in my writing, only I do it with people on the page: “What if this family was in this situation?”

What does the title Everything I Never Told You mean to you?
The title is actually an echo of one of the last lines of the book. Everything I Never Told You refers, on the one hand, to the secrets that the members of the Lee family keep from one another—all the things they lock inside because they’re afraid to say them or they’re ashamed to say them. But it also refers to all the things they don’t say by accident, so to speak—the things they forget to say because they don’t seem important. After Lydia’s death, each member of her family thinks back to the last time they saw her and what they’d have said if they knew it was the last time. The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn’t get to have your say or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.

ABOUT CELESTE NG

Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.

Discussion questions for 'Everything I Never Told You'

1. Discuss the relationships between Nath, Lydia, and Hannah. How do the siblings both understand and mystify one another?
   


2. Why do you think Lydia is the favorite child of James and Marilyn? How does this pressure affect Lydia, and what kind of impact do you think it has on Nath and Hannah? Do you think it is more difficult for Lydia to be the favorite, or for Nath and Hannah, who are often overlooked by their parents?


3. “So part of him wanted to tell Nath that he knew: what it was like to be teased, what it was like to never fit in. The other part of him wanted to shake his son, to slap him. To shape him into something different. . . . When Marilyn asked what happened, James said merely, with a wave of the hand, ‘Some kids teased him at the pool yesterday. He needs to learn to take a joke.’”


4. How did you react to the “Marco Polo” pool scene with James and Nath? What do you think of James’s decision?


5. Discuss a situation in which you’ve felt like an outsider. How do the members of the Lee family deal with being measured against stereotypes and others’ perceptions?


6. What is the meaning of the novel’s title? To whom do the “I” and “you” refer?


7. What would have happened if Lydia had reached the dock? Do you think she would have been able to change her parents’ views and expectations of her?


8. This novel says a great deal about the influence our parents can have on us. Do you think the same issues will affect the next generation of Lees? How did your parents influence your childhood?


9. “It struck her then, as if someone had said it aloud: her mother was dead, and the only thing worth remembering about her, in the end, was that she cooked. Marilyn thought uneasily of her own life, of hours spent making breakfasts, serving dinners, packing lunches into neat paper bags.”


10. Discuss the relationship Marilyn and her mother have to cooking and their roles as stay-at-home mothers. Do you think one is happier or more satisfied?


11. The footprint on the ceiling brings Nath and Lydia closer when they are young, and later, Hannah and James discover it together and laugh. What other objects bring the characters closer together or drive them further apart?


12. There’s so much that the characters keep to themselves. What do you wish they had shared with one another? Do you think an ability to better express themselves would have changed the outcome of the book?

Book discussion questions

• Will this book stand the test of time?

• Do any of the characters seem to be unique individuals, or are they all simply two-dimensional figures whose experiences serve only to convey the author's political message?

• What are some themes in the novel? How do they relate to the plot and characters?

• Did the novel seem believable?

• How did the book portray women? What is the role of women in the text? How are mothers represented? What about single/independent women?

• Do you find the characters likable? Are the characters persons you would want to meet?

• Does the novel end the way you expected? How? Why

• What is the central/primary purpose of the novel? Is the purpose important or meaningful?

• In what ways does the author depict capitalism as destructive? Consider the characters’ personal lives and social interactions.

• After reading the book do you think the author succeeds in accomplishing what /she set out to do? Does s/he fail in certain sections or reveal a bias that strays from stated intentions?

• Would you recommend this novel to a friend? Thumbs up? Thumbs down?

• Pick a particular segment, chapter, or example that stands out to you once you are finished reading the book. Why did you pick it, and what is the author's larger point in including it? Is it particularly upsetting, graphic, informative, controversial, etc?

• Fast food chains and convenience foods, despite the myriad problems documented, have an undeniable appeal-they are convenient and offer inexpensive and tasty food. Even if you are disturbed by the practices of these corporations, could you realistically swear off your food, given its ubiquity and mainstream appeal? If you are driving home from work, tired and hungry, and your two choices are a familiar fast food restaurant or an unknown Mom-and-pop, which would you choose? What kinds of implications does this choice have?

• Since few people would confuse fast food with health food, who bears the greater responsibility for the alarming rate of obesity in children in the United States: the fast food chains that market "supersize" meals to children and the companies that make convenience food, or parents who are not educating their children about the benefits of a balanced diet? Can well-intentioned parents maintain control over the eating habits of their children in an era when school districts are contracting to bring fast food into the school cafeteria? On the other hand, do you view it as an impingement on civil liberties when organizations such as school districts, refuse to have vending machines on site in order to avoid presenting kids with unhealthy options?

• What is an example of what can happen when important matters of public policy are abandoned by government to the self interests of corporations?

• What do you think is the role of government when it comes to the food industry? How much oversight do you think there should be? Should the government refuse to allow some foods that are bad for health? What are your thoughts when you hear that European countries ban some of the food additives we allow? What might be some arguments AGAINST toughening national food safety laws to prevent e.coli or salmonella?

• If one accepts the author's assertions that the food corporations are engaging in patterns of unethical conduct, what can the consumer do to modify their behavior? Can the conduct of an individual have an impact on a company's practices? Why is a company most likely to change its conduct? To generate public goodwill? To respond to its employees' concerns? To address diminishing profits?

• Much of the book focuses upon aspects of the corporate world including marketing, labor practices, political ties, and the growth of specific industries. How do the points the author makes matter in your own life?

December 2014: 'Everything I never Told You'

Becky has decided to go with Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng for our December 2014 book. It is Amazon's pick for best book of 2014.

ABOUT THE BOOKLydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . . So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.

When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. Lydia’s older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it’s the youngest of the family—Hannah—who observes far more than anyone realizes and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened.

A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

REVIEWS

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2014: Lydia is dead. From the first sentence of Celeste Ng’s stunning debut, we know that the oldest daughter of the Chinese-American Lee family has died. What follows is a novel that explores alienation, achievement, race, gender, family, and identity--as the police must unravel what has happened to Lydia, the Lee family must uncover the sister and daughter that they hardly knew. There isn’t a false note in this book, and my only concern in describing my profound admiration for Everything I Never Told You is that it might raise unachievable expectations in the reader. But it’s that good. Achingly, precisely, and sensitively written. --Chris Schluep

From Booklist

*Starred Review* A teenage girl goes missing and is later found to have drowned in a nearby lake, and suddenly a once tight-knit family unravels in unexpected ways. As the daughter of a college professor and his stay-at-home wife in a small Ohio town in the 1970s, Lydia Lee is already unwittingly part of the greater societal changes going on all around her. But Lydia suffers from pressure that has nothing to do with tuning out and turning on. Her father is an American born of first-generation Chinese immigrants, and his ethnicity, and hers, make them conspicuous in any setting. Her mother is white, and their interracial marriage raises eyebrows and some intrusive charges of miscegenation. More troubling, however, is her mother’s frustration at having given up medical school for motherhood, and how she blindly and selfishly insists that Lydia follow her road not taken. The cracks in Lydia’s perfect-daughter foundation grow slowly but erupt suddenly and tragically, and her death threatens to destroy her parents and deeply scar her siblings. Tantalizingly thrilling, Ng’s emotionally complex debut novel captures the tension between cultures and generations with the deft touch of a seasoned writer. Ng will be one to watch. --Carol Haggas

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 
Celeste Ng is the author of the novel EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Currently, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son. To learn more about her and her work, visit her website at http://celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter: @pronounced_ing.

November 2014 book: 'The Riddle-Master of Hed'

So, Amy has selected "The Riddle-Master of Hed" by Patricia McKillip. This is the book Amy said about it: "I started reading it again and remembered how much I enjoyed it. It's what got me started on fantasy books like 'Lord of the Rings.'

"People should be warned that it's fantasy and will have some magical elements.

"Folks should also know that they're looking for just book 1, not the whole Riddle-Master trilogy.

"There's one copy at the (Hennepin County) library. Used copies are available for cheap (like, less than 1 dollar) on Amazon."

ABOUT THE BOOK
Long ago, the wizards had vanished from the world, and all knowledge was left hidden in riddles. Morgon, prince of the simple farmers of Hed, proved himself a master of such riddles when he staked his life to win a crown from the dead Lord of Aum.

But now ancient, evil forces were threatening him. Shape changers began replacing friends until no man could be trusted. So Morgon was forced to flee to hostile kingdoms, seeking the High One who ruled from mysterious Erlenstar Mountain.

Beside him went Deth, the High One's Harper. Ahead lay strange encounters and terrifying adventures. And with him always was the greatest of unsolved riddles -- the nature of the three stars on his forehead that seemed to drive him toward his ultimate destiny.

Meet Martha Grimes

A long-time Anglophile, it was her first poem in Send Bygraves that inspired her to turn from poetry to mystery novels. Martha Grimes sent the novel “over the transom” (sans agent) to several publishers. In 1979 an editor at Little, Brown, Inc. found the book in the “slush pile” (where unsolicited manuscripts are dumped for editorial assistants to read) and offered to publish The Man with a Load of Mischief with a first printing of 3,000 copies. The Man with a Load of Mischief was published in 1981, and from there Martha Grimes has published a book (sometimes two) every year for the past 25 years.

By her fourth and fifth books Martha received major review attention that not only lauded her ability as an American to write authentic British mysteries, but also to merge the conceits of the British form with the tone and atmosphere of the American. “Help the Poor Struggler is rather an American novel, with brooding and cynical overtones of Raymond Chandler” (Time magazine, 7/15/85). In 1987 The Five Bells & Bladebone was her “breakthrough” book, landing on the New York Times bestseller list. Her next two books, The Old Silent and The Old Contemptibles, were also New York Times bestsellers in both hardcover and paperback. Of The Old Contemptibles, The New York Times Book Review said: “The author keeps us enthralled with the rich interior and exterior lives of her characters in this emotionally stormy family saga.”

In 1992, with the publication of The End of the Pier, Martha departed from her beloved cast of characters in the Richard Jury series to write a contemporary novel based in Western Maryland that combined a serial killer murder mystery with a poignant story of the problems in a mother and son relationship. The book established her as a writer of merit outside of mystery fiction — “The End of the Pier is two books in one: a juicy mystery novel and an exploration of human behavior that few readers will forget” (San Francisco Chronicle, 2/7/92). The second book in the series — Hotel Paradise — was published four years later and was praised by the critics as “A place not unlike the novel itself: outside of time, almost unbelievable, utterly engaging” (Washington Post, 5/26/97) and “Meandering and atmospheric, the novel reads with the ease of daydream … the author proves herself a writer of delicate sensibility whose work is notable for its delightfully quirky details, insightful perceptions into human relationships and graceful prose (Los Angeles Times, 5/26/96). ).

Cold Flat Junction (2001) and Belle Ruin (2005) continues the adventures of twelve-year-old detective, Emma Graham. “A tour de force-cobwebby mystery,” according to Kirkus, “Cold Flat Junction melds classic mystery with a coming-of-age story in which the young protagonist must face the hard and often shocking realities of adulthood as she uncovers good and evil in their many guises and tries to set the past at rest” (Baltimore Sun, 1/28/01).

In 1993, with the release of The Horse You Came in On, Martha brought Richard Jury and Melrose Plant to America for the first time to the pub of that name in Baltimore, Maryland. It was such a success and fan reaction was so positive (the Mayor of Baltimore gave her the key to the city and declared August 12, 1993 as “Martha Grimes Day”) she brought Richard Jury over again in Rainbow’s End to investigate a mystery that leads him to Sante Fe, New Mexico

In 1997, Martha returned Richard Jury and Melrose Plant to England in The Case Has Altered. The New York Times Book Review applauded the book’s “enchanting additions tot he Grimes gallery of eccentric characters,” and it was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

The Stargazey, the fifteenth Richard Jury novel, published on November 5, 1998, become an instant bestseller and USA Today praised, “Like good British Tweed, Martha Grimes’ wintry new mystery envelops the reader in all the comforts of a serviceable English whodunit.”

 

The publication of Biting the Moon on April 15, 1999, marked a departure for Grimes, the first book a new series of books focusing on the prevention of animal abuse and featuring two teenage heroines. She donated two-thirds of her royalties to animal abuse organizations across the country, and said, “I do not believe that people are indifferent to the welfare of animals, possibly, the exact opposite is true – people are so affected by stories, pictures, accounts of animal abuse that they simply do not want to know.”

With the publication of The Blue Last in September, 2001, Ms. Grimes found herself back on the New York Times Bestseller list for the first time in a decade. She received more fan mail than for any other book by distraught fans worried about the “death” of Richard Jury. Her following four Jury mysteries, The Grave Maurice (2003), The Winds of Change (2004), The Old Wine Shades (2006) , Dust (2007) and The Black Cat (2010) were also New York Times best sellers.

Vertigo 42 is the latest Martha Grimes novel and the 23rd book in the bestselling Richard Jury mystery series.

Inimitable Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury returns in another “literate, lyrical, funny, funky, discursive, bizarre” mystery, now with a tip of the derby to Alfred Hitchcock’s famous movie, ‘Vertigo’. Martha Grimes’ greatly anticipated Richard Jury mystery, Vertigo 42, is on sale June 3. Luckily you don’t have to wait until then to read the first chapter.

From http://www.marthagrimes.com/authors/biography/

October 2014 book: Help the Poor Struggler

Cindy has selected our October 2014 book: "Help the Poor Struggler" by Martha Grimes. "These are a series but I have read most of them out of order," said Cindy. "We have done this with other books that group had a problem with, but will see how it goes. I love this author and Richard Jury character."

ABOUT THE BOOK
Around bleak Dartmoor, where the Hound of the Baskervilles once bayed, three children have been brutally murdered. Now Richard Jury of Scotland Yard joins forces with a hot-tempered local constable named Brian Macalvie to track down the killer. The trail begins at a desolate pub, Help the Poor Struggler. It leads straight to the estate of Lady Jessica, a ten-year-old orphaned heiress who lives with her mysterious uncle and ever-changing series of governesses. And as suspense spreads across the forbidding landscape, an old injustice returns to haunt Macalvie…with clues that link a murder in the distant past with a killing yet to come.

"A superior writer." --The New York Times Book Review

"A star in the mystery genre...An elegant writer and inventor of dazzling plots." --Publishers Weekly

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martha Grimes is the bestselling author of twenty-one Richard Jury novels, as well as the novels Dakota and Foul Matter, among others. Her previous two Jury books, The Old Wine Shades and Dust, both appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.

Meet the author

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, the author of "Hannah, Delivered" graced our September meeting to talk with us about her book and the 12-year process it took to get it published. We had a lovely time!!

September 2014 book: 'Hannah, Delivered'

I'm picking a book written by a local author for us to read in September:

"Hannah, Delivered" by Elizabeth Jarret Andrew.

The author lives in my neighborhood, and teaches writing classes at The Loft. She has written several other books, including a spiritual memoir.

Hannah, Delivered: A Novel

Late one night in a busy St. Paul hospital, a nurse midwife drags Hannah Larson out from behind her reception desk to assist with a birth.  When Hannah witnesses that baby tumble into the world, her secure, conventional life gets upended by a fierce desire to deliver babies.  So begins Hannah’s journey away from her comfort zone. In a midwifery apprenticeship in New Mexico, she befriends a male midwife, defends a teenage mom, and learns to trust women’s bodies, then moves back to Minnesota to start her own illicit birth practice.  Hannah’s need to stay safe proves both an asset and a liability: homebirth isn’t legal in Minnesota in the 1990’s; to deliver healthy babies, Hannah risks jail time, her community’s respect, and her career.  The key to unlocking her fear rests in one birth—her own.

Hannah, Delivered tells the story of how inexplicable passion, buried strength, and professional skill deliver one woman from fear into a rich and risk-filled life.

New book for August 2014: Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

Cass previewed the book she thought she wanted us to read as a book club, and then changed her mind. And so, for August 2014 we're reading "Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened" by Allie Brosh.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Every time Allie Brosh posts something new on her hugely popular blog Hyperbole and a Half the internet rejoices.

Touching, absurd, and darkly comic, Allie Brosh’s highly anticipated book Hyperbole and a Half showcases her unique voice, leaping wit, and her ability to capture complex emotions with deceptively simple illustrations.

This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features more than fifty percent new content, with ten never-before-seen essays and one wholly revised and expanded piece as well as classics from the website like, “The God of Cake,” “Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving,” and her astonishing, “Adventures in Depression,” and “Depression Part Two,” which have been hailed as some of the most insightful meditations on the disease ever written.

Brosh’s debut marks the launch of a major new American humorist who will surely make even the biggest scrooge or snob laugh. We dare you not to.

FROM THE AUTHOR:
This is a book I wrote. Because I wrote it, I had to figure out what to put on the back cover to explain what it is. I tried to write a long, third-person summary that would imply how great the book is and also sound vaguely authoritative—like maybe someone who isn’t me wrote it—but I soon discovered that I’m not sneaky enough to pull it off convincingly. So I decided to just make a list of things that are in the book:

Pictures
Words
Stories about things that happened to me
Stories about things that happened to other people because of me
Eight billion dollars*
Stories about dogs
The secret to eternal happiness*

*These are lies. Perhaps I have underestimated my sneakiness!

NPR interview with Valerie Plame

Click here to view interview.
http://www.npr.org/2013/09/28/226529040/i-spy-valerie-plame-makes-her-fiction-debut-in-cia-thriller

Vanessa Pierson, the heroine of Valerie Plame's first novel, is — ahem — "blonde, lithe, and nicely sexy." She is also a CIA agent, determined to lasso a nuclear arms dealer named Bhoot before he arrives at an underground nuclear facility in Iran.
But just as her informant is about to tell her where Bhoot will be, he's shot by a sniper who misses Vanessa — or does he simply overlook her? How will Vanessa Pierson halt the terrorists, protect the world and, by the way, also keep the secret of her forbidden romance with David, a fellow CIA ops officer with green-flecked hazel eyes?
Blowback moves through assorted picturesque world capitals, including Vienna, Paris, London and Prague, with occasional glimpses of the comparatively mundane suburbs around Washington D.C. The authors are Sarah Lovett, a career suspense novelist, and Valerie Plame, who may be the most famous former CIA covert operations officer who was ever portrayed by Naomi Watts in a major motion picture.
As a spy thriller, the book contains its fair share of shootouts and high-speed chases, but Plame tells NPR's Scott Simon that she and Lovett wanted the novel to paint a "realistic portrait" of a female operations officer. Someone, she says, "who is genuine and isn't just using sex and guns — although they're great, too — to collect intelligence."

---

Interview Highlights

On the similarities between herself and Pierson
The great thing about fiction is you can fix things and make things better. I think Vanessa is a smarter version of where I was. And it's definitely informed by my experiences in the CIA.
It is fiction, but of course I was able to draw on my experience. I developed my expertise in the agency in nuclear counterproliferation. And that's why that's the main theme of this first book, hopefully in a long series. But it's sort of ripped from the headlines.

More on Valerie Plame

On why Pierson blames herself after her asset is shot
There is definitely a sense that when you, as a CIA ops officer ... are handling assets, they are delivering to you their trust and their well-being. And you feel very protective of them, even if they're not very nice people.
On the isolation of having a job you can't discuss
It's lonely. That's why, in many ways, the CIA is the world's biggest dating agency, I think. I imagine it's much like two actors that get married because they understand that universe. You know, I'm pretty sure the agency's divorce rate is rather high.
On the glamour of spy thrillers versus the reality of CIA operations
I would say ... there's a lot of downtime. You spend a lot of time waiting. You're waiting in a bar, or in a restaurant, or at a corner to make your meeting. You're doing a lot of surveillance detection routes to make sure that no one is on your tail. You can't put that in a book before the reader puts it down really quickly. However, both Sarah and I felt very strongly [that] we wanted to make it a realistic portrait, particularly of a female operations officer in the CIA. For the most part, to my mind ... how they're portrayed in popular culture is paper dolls — really props more than anything else. And I wanted a strong but realistic character.
On the recent NSA leaks, and being surprised and outraged by what they revealed
I find it absolutely astounding. The revelations about the extent and the breadth of the NSA is nothing short of breathtaking. This goes to the very essence of the Fourth Amendment and, broader, what we want as a democracy and that very perilous tension and dynamic between security and privacy. And we really do need to have a national dialogue on this, on how much we are willing to give up to be kept safe.
On reclaiming her life after the 2003 leak
I love my career. I thought if I was lucky I would retire as a senior intelligence officer, still working on the issues of counterproliferation. But that didn't happen, so — new chapter. We moved away from Washington and have settled into a new community and, you know, rebuilt our lives.

'What Alice Forgot' book discussion questions

From http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/what_alice_forgot.html

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Did you like the younger Alice best? Or did you relate more to the older Alice?


2. What would your younger self of ten years ago think of the person you are today?


3. What would surprise your younger self most about the life you're currently leading? What would disappoint you?


4. What would you think of your children? Are they how you imagined they would be? Are you the parent you envisioned? Why or why not?


5. Alice is shocked by many transformations—her gym-toned body, her clothes, her house. Are you more or less polished than you were a decade ago? And do you think there's any deeper significance to such change?


6. Do you think it was realistic that Alice ended up back with Nick? Were you happy with that ending? Do you think they would have ended up together if she hadn't lost her memory?


7. In order for Nick to be successful at his job, was it inevitable that he would spend less time with his family and thereby grow apart from Alice?


8. How did you feel about the sections written from the perspectives of Elisabeth and Frannie? Did they add to your enjoyment of the book, or would you have preferred to have it written entirely from Alice's point of view?


9. Do you think it was unavoidable that Elisabeth and Alice had grown apart, because of the tension caused by Elisabeth's infertility versus Alice's growing family? Or do you think their rift had more to do with the kind of people both of them had become?


10. It's not only Alice who changed over the last decade. Elisabeth changed, too. Do you think she would have been so accepting of the new Alice at the end if she herself didn't get pregnant?


11. Out of all the characters in the book, who do you think had changed the most over the past decade and why?


12. The film rights to the book have been sold to Fox 2000—who do you think would be good in the lead roles?


13. If you were to write a letter to your future self to be opened in ten years, what would you say?

Meet Liane Moriarty

From http://www.lianemoriarty.com/

Liane was born on a beautiful November day in 1966 in Sydney. A few hours after she was born, she smiled directly at her father through the nursery glass window, which is remarkable, seeing as most babies can’t even focus their eyes at that age.

Her first word was ‘glug’. This was faithfully recorded in the baby book kept by her mother. (As the eldest of six children, Liane was the only one to get a baby book so she likes to refer to it often.)
As a child, she loved to read, so much so that school friends would cruelly hide their books when she came to play. She still doesn’t know how to go to sleep at night without first reading a novel for a very long time in a very hot bath.

She can’t remember the first story she ever wrote, but she does remember her first publishing deal. Her father ‘commissioned’ her to write a novel for him and paid her an advance of $1.00. She wrote a three volume epic called, ‘The Mystery of Dead Man’s Island’

After leaving school, Liane began a career in advertising and marketing. She became quite corporate for a while and wore suits and worried a lot about the size of her office. She eventually left her position as marketing manager of a legal publishing company to run her own (not especially successful) business called The Little Ad Agency. After that she worked as (a more successful, thankfully) freelance advertising copywriter, writing everything from websites and TV commercials to the back of the Sultana Bran box.

She also wrote short stories and many first chapters of novels that didn’t go any further. The problem was that she didn’t actually believe that real people had novels published. Then one day she found out that they did, when her younger sister Jaclyn Moriarty called to say that her (brilliant, hilarious, award-winning) novel, Feeling Sorry for Celia was about to be published.

In a fever of sibling rivalry, Liane rushed to the computer and wrote a children’s book called The Animal Olympics, which went on to be enthusiastically rejected by every publisher in Australia.

Liane and sister Jaci

Liane (right) and sister Jaci today

She calmed down and enrolled in a Masters degree at Macquarie University in Sydney. As part of that degree, she wrote her first novel, Three Wishes. It was accepted by the lovely people at Pan Macmillan and went on to be published around the world. (Her latest books are published by the equally lovely people at Amy Einhorn Books in the US and Penguin in the UK)

Since then she has written four more novels for adults, as well as a series of books for children.
In August 2013 Liane’s fifth novel The Husband’s Secret was released in the US and within two weeks had climbed the charts to become a #1 New York Times Bestseller. Much champagne was drunk.

Liane's youngest sister Nicola Moriarty has also released 2 novels, a wonderful, gripping story called Free-falling and her brilliant follow up novel, Paper Chains published by Random House.
Liane is now a full-time author. She lives in Sydney with her husband and two small children who like to climb all over her while she tries to write helpfully smashing their fists against the keyboard and suggesting she might like to watch the Wiggles instead.

Once upon a time she went heli-skiing and skydiving* and scuba diving. These days she goes to the park and ‘Gymbaroo’ and sings ‘I’m a Little Cuckoo Clock’ at swimming lessons. She has discovered that the adrenaline burst you experience from jumping out of a plane is remarkably similar to the one you get when your toddler makes a run for it in a busy car park

*She should disclose that she only ever went skydiving once and has no intention of ever doing it again. She just likes to give the impression that she once led an incredibly active, athletic life to make up for all the hours she now spends lying around reading novels and eating Turkish Delight. 

July 2014 book: "What Alice Forgot"

"For July, I am picking 'What Alice Forgot' by Liane Moriarty," said Becky. "I read 'The Husband's Secret' by her about a year ago and liked it a lot."

 

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, THE HUSBAND’S SECRET...

A “cheerfully engaging”* novel for anyone who’s ever asked herself, “How did I get here?”

  

Alice Love is twenty-nine, crazy about her husband, and pregnant with her first child.

 

So imagine Alice’s surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym (a gym! She HATES the gym) and is whisked off to the hospital where she discovers the honeymoon is truly over — she’s getting divorced, she has three kids, and she’s actually 39 years old. Alice must reconstruct the events of a lost decade, and find out whether it’s possible to reconstruct her life at the same time. She has to figure out why her sister hardly talks to her, and how is it that she’s become one of those super skinny moms with really expensive clothes. Ultimately, Alice must discover whether forgetting is a blessing or a curse, and whether it’s possible to start over…

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

See http://www.lianemoriarty.com/

Liane Moriarty is the Australian author of five internationally best-selling novels, Three Wishes, The Last Anniversary, What Alice Forgot,
The Hypnotist's Love Story and
The Husband's Secret.

Writing as L.M.Moriarty, she is also the author of the Space Brigade books for children, (published in the US as the Nicola Berry, Earthling Ambassador series).

 

 

Gordon Parks: Videos & his photos

- Here is a link to the Gordon Parks Foundation, which includes galleries of his photos.

http://www.gordonparksfoundation.org/archive/


- Here are links to videos about Gordon Parks:

In the Footsteps of Gordon Parks

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10200144650563724&set=vb.468638133168346&type=2&theater

- 1996 Clip of Gordon Parks with the TPT Don't Believe the Hype! Crew. — at Twin Cities Public Television.

One Minneapolis One Read on Comcast Newsmakers

On Comcast Newsmakers, Kevyn Burger interviews Kim Ellison, One Minneapolis One Read vice chair, and Robin Hickman, the great-niece of  "A Choice of Weapons" author Gordon Parks, about Minneapolis' community read.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLCyoZBQHvs&feature=share&list=UU1IHi7mIMbFhZo4j_H6QIsA

A Choice of Weapons discussion questions

Courtesy of Hennepin County Book Discussion Guide.
http://oneminneapolisoneread.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2013_discussion_guide.pdf

1. As you started reading this memoir, what set the

tone for you in how Gordon Parks wrote his story?

 

2. What is the impact of the history of the Great

Depression being told through personal stories?

How is the effect different than reading a

textbook about those years?

 

3. How much of Gordon’s story is shaped by self-

determination, fate or luck?

 

4. What words would you use to describe Gordon? 

 

5. How much did Gordon mature over the course of

the story?

 

6. How would the author’s life have been different

if he were a young person of today?

 

7. How do the relationships between Gordon and

his family shape his perspective and his actions?

Think about his mother, father, sisters, uncles,

father- and mother-in-law.

 

8. What was the “hawk over the ghetto”? Is it still

flying over urban areas today?

 

9. How are the faces of racism different from placeto place in Gordon’s story? (Kansas, Minnesota, Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C. and Florida)

 

10. Gordon wrote, “Minnesota Negroes were given

more, so they had less to fi ght for. Negro and white boys fought now and then in the Twin Cities,but the fights never amounted to much” (p. 52). Do you agree with his statement? Do you think this is different today than in the times he is writing about?

 

11. Creativity and talent are evident throughout

Gordon’s life. What are some examples? How has

creative expression helped you in trying times?

 

12. What were the weapons that Gordon found “one

by one,” and how did their presence comfort him?

 

13. During the stream of consciousness scene

(pp. 110-114), what happens? Why is it written that

way? What do you think of the language used?

 

14. Why is this story important to us today?

 

15. Were you familiar with Gordon’s story before

reading this book? Were you inspired to learn more

about Gordon and his weapons afterwards?

 

May 2014 book: Blowback

Cindy has announced her selection for May 2014: Blowback by Valerie Plame. "My choice is one I have been thinking about for some time since I heard a review of the book and interview of author," she said.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Introducing Blowback, an exhilarating new espionage thriller by former CIA ops officer Valerie Plame and thriller writer Sarah Lovett.

Covert CIA ops officer Vanessa Pierson is finally close to capturing the world’s most dangerous international nuclear arms dealer: Bhoot, alias the ghost. One of her assets has information about Bhoot’s upcoming visit to a secret underground nuclear weapons facility in Iran—in only a few days. But just as Pierson’s informant is about to give her the location, they’re ambushed by an expert sniper. Pierson narrowly escapes. Her asset: dead.

Desperate to capture Bhoot and the sniper before they inflict more damage, Pierson enlists all of the Agency’s resources to find them. But with each day, the pressure of the manhunt mounts, causing her to push her forbidden romance with a fellow ops officer to its limit when she asks him to do the impossible. Despite the risks, she refuses to halt her pursuit of the terrorists, and she puts her cover and her career—and her life—at risk.

With rapid-cut shifts from European capitals to Washington to the Near East, and with insider detail that only a former spy could provide, Blowback marks the explosive beginning of the hunt for Bhoot, the villain whom Vanessa Pierson devotes her life to capturing, dead or alive.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
There is another book out there that talks about who she is. Here is that book description:

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The public disclosure of that secret information spurred a federal investigation and led to the trial and conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, and the Wilsons' civil suit against top officials of the Bush administration. Much has been written about the "Valerie Plame" story, but Valerie herself has been silent, until now. Some of what has been reported about her has been frighteningly accurate, serving as a pungent reminder to the Wilsons that their lives are no longer private. And some has been completely false -- distorted characterizations of Valerie and her husband and their shared integrity.

Valerie Wilson retired from the CIA in January 2006, and now, not only as a citizen but as a wife and mother, the daughter of an Air Force colonel, and the sister of a U.S. marine, she sets the record straight, providing an extraordinary account of her training and experiences, and answers many questions that have been asked about her covert status, her responsibilities, and her life. As readers will see, the CIA still deems much of the detail of Valerie's story to be classified. As a service to readers, an afterword by national security reporter Laura Rozen provides a context for Valerie's own story.

Gordon Parks exhibit at Mill City Museum

Hey all! There's an exhibit of Gordon Park's photographs at the Mill City Museum through June. Anyone interested in going?

See more:

http://www.millcitymuseum.org/choice-weapons-exhibit

A Choice of Weapons: A Living Legacy

Free

Through June 8, 2014

Located in Mill Commons (museum’s main lobby)

View an exhibit of photographs created by Minneapolis high school students alongside images by photographer Gordon Parks, on loan from the Gordon Parks Foundation. . The exhibit is part of One Minneapolis One Read which has chosen Parks' autobiography A Choice of Weapons as its 2013 selection. Taking inspiration from the book, the students worked with acclaimed photographer Jamel Shabazz at Juxtaposition Arts to create their own photographs. Shabazz worked with the students in early October during a week-long artist residency.

June 2014 book: Divergent

Amy has picked Divergent by Veronica Roth for us to read in June 2014. It's a book that's getting a lot of attention lately, and was just released in March 2014 as a movie.

ABOUT THE BOOK
In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she's chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she's kept hidden from everyone because she's been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.

Debut author Veronica Roth bursts onto the YA scene with the first book in the Divergent series—dystopian thrillers filled with electrifying decisions, heartbreaking betrayals, stunning consequences, and unexpected romance.

Biography

Veronica Roth was born in a Chicago suburb, and studied creative writing at Northwestern University. She and her husband currently live in the city that inspired the setting of the Divergent Trilogy.

A Q&A with Author Veronica Roth

Q: What advice would you offer to young aspiring writers, who long to live a success story like your own?
Roth: One piece of advice I have is: Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, fall in love with the writing—the characters, the story, the words, the themes—and make sure that you are who you are regardless of your life circumstances. That way, when the good things come, they don’t warp you, and when the bad things hit you, you don’t fall apart.

Q: You’re a young author--is it your current adult perspective or not-so-recent teenage perspective that brought about the factions in the development of this story? Do you think that teens or adults are more likely to fit into categories in our current society?
Roth: Other aspects of my identity have more to do with the factions than my age. The faction system reflects my beliefs about human nature—that we can make even something as well-intentioned as virtue into an idol, or an evil thing. And that virtue as an end unto itself is worthless to us. I did spend a large portion of my adolescence trying to be as “good” as possible so that I could prove my worth to the people around me, to myself, to God, to everyone. It’s only now that I’m a little older that I realize I am unable to be truly “good” and that it’s my reasons for striving after virtue that need adjustment more than my behavior. In a sense, Divergent is me writing through that realization—everyone in Beatrice’s society believes that virtue is the end, the answer. I think that’s a little twisted.
I think we all secretly love and hate categories—love to get a firm hold on our identities, but hate to be confined—and I never loved and hated them more than when I was a teenager. That said: Though we hear a lot about high school cliques, I believe that adults categorize each other just as often, just in subtler ways. It is a dangerous tendency of ours. And it begins in adolescence.

Q: If you could add one more faction to the world within Divergent, what would it be?
Roth: I tried to construct the factions so that they spanned a wide range of virtues. Abnegation, for example, includes five of the traditional “seven heavenly virtues:” chastity, temperance, charity, patience, and humility. That said, it would be interesting to have a faction centered on industriousness, in which diligence and hard work are valued most, and laziness is not allowed. They would be in constant motion, and would probably be happy to take over for the factionless. And hard-working people can certainly take their work too far, as all the factions do with their respective virtues. I’m not sure what they would wear, though. Overalls, probably.

Q: What do you think are the advantages, if any, to the society you’ve created in Divergent?
Roth: All the advantages I see only seem like advantages to me because I live in our current society. For example, the members of their society don’t focus on certain things: race, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc. I mean, a world in which you look different from the majority and no one minds? That sounds good to me. But when I think about it more, I realize that they’re doing the exact same thing we do, but with different criteria by which to distinguish ourselves from others. Instead of your skin color, it’s the color of your shirt that people assess, or the results of your aptitude test. Same problem, different system.

Q: What book are you currently reading and how has it changed you, if at all?
Roth: I recently finished Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma, which I would call “contemporary with a paranormal twist,” or something to that effect. It’s about a girl whose sister has a powerful kind of magnetism within the confines of a particular town, and how their love for each other breaks some things apart and puts other things back together. It was refreshing to read a young adult book that is about sisterhood instead of romance. It’s one of those books that makes you love a character and then hate a character and then love them again—that shows you that people aren’t all good or all bad, but somewhere in between. Imaginary Girls gave me a lot to think about, and the writing was lovely, which I always love to see.