Table of Contents: Halfway House

Author: Katharine Noel
Publisher/Year: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006
Synopsis: One day, Angie Voorster diligent student, all-star swimmer, and Ivy League-bound high school senior dives to the bottom of a pool and stays there. In that moment, everything the Voorster family believes they know about one another changes. Set in a small town in New Hampshire, Halfway House is the story of Angie's psychotic break and her family's subsequent turmoil. Each of her family members responds differently to the ongoing crisis: Her father Pieter, a professional cellist, retreats further into his music; her mother begins a destabilizing affair with a younger man; her younger brother, Luke, first pushes away from her then later drops out of college to be closer to her. Though the Voorsters manage for a time to maintain a semblance of the normalcy they had "before," it is not until Angie is finally able to fend for herself that the family is able to truly fall apart and then regather itself in a new, fundamentally changed way.

What Others Have To Say
The New York Times
"Noel writes Angie's manic episodes with a harrowing immediacy, but even better, she captures the fragility of her saner moments."

Entertainment Weekly
"...an overly splashy way to dramatize Angie's first psychotic break, but Noel deserves immense credit for her precise and delicate description of the grinding years that follow."

Psychiatry Online
"The author seems to be reaching for capturing the ordinary in the extraordinary, and this may be enough for some readers."

Extras
Read an excerpt

Line By Line: John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

"The only way you get Americans to notice anything is to tax them or draft them or kill them." 

"Never confuse faith, or belief – of any kind - with something even remotely intellectual." 

"If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive." 

"It is amazing to me, now, how such wild imaginings and philosophies - inspired by a night charged with frights and calamities - made such perfectly good sense to Owen Meany and me, but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive." 

"Logic is relative." 

Canada Reads Book Club: Let the Debate Begin!

Here we are, primed on the eve of the Canada Reads debate live on CBC Radio One. After all the reading and discussion, we have determined where we are hanging our debating hat. It was not an easy decision, as all the books had much going for them but the final decider was which novel stuck in our head the longest. And that novel was:

So everyone tune in tomorrow - 11:30AM EST, 9:30AM MST - and let the fun begin!

Book Trailer: Kimberly Derting, The Body Finder

Table of Contents: The Condition

Author: Jennifer Haig
Publisher/Year: HarperCollins, 2008
Synopsis: The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. The year is 1976, and the family, Frank McKotch, an eminent scientist; his pedigreed wife, Paulette; and their three beautiful children has embarked on its annual vacation at the Captain's House, the grand old family retreat on Cape Cod. One day on the beach, Frank is struck by an image he cannot forget: his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, strangely infantile in her child-sized bikini, standing a full head shorter than her younger cousin Charlotte. At that moment he knows a truth that he can never again unknown something is terribly wrong with his only daughter. The McKotch family will never be the same.

Twenty years after Gwen's diagnosis with Turner's syndrome, a genetic condition that has prevented her from maturing, trapping her forever in the body of a child, all five family members are still dealing with the fallout. Each believes himself crippled by some secret pathology; each feels responsible for the family's demise. Frank and Paulette are acrimoniously divorced. Billy, the eldest son, is dutiful but distant, a handsome Manhattan cardiologist with a life built on compromise. His brother, Scott, awakens from a pot-addled adolescence to a soul-killing job, a regrettable marriage, and a vinyl-sided tract house in the suburbs. And Gwen is silent and emotionally aloof, a bright, accomplished woman who spurns any interaction with those around her. She makes peace with the hermetic life she's constructed until, well into her thirties, she falls in love for the first time. And suddenly, once again, the family's world is tilted on its axis.

What Others Have To Say
The Boston Globe
"Yet quite aside from the quietness of its writing style, this novel seems to have something missing, and what exactly is absent is difficult to pinpoint."

New York Daily News
"...the pleasure of Haigh's story is in the telling."

USA Today
"Haigh skillfully crafts the narrative to divide it between the five main characters, each of whom offers a very different view of the same events."

The Washington Post
"The title, however, is actually a reference to the condition of the whole McKotch clan and the ramifications of their constitutional, inbred inability to communicate."

Extras
Reading Guide
Author Interview

Adaptation: The Princess Bride

Table of Contents: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

Author: Ben Fountain
Publisher/Year: HarperCollins, 2006
Synopsis: The well-intentioned protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara are caught — to both disastrous and hilarious effect — in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. With masterful pacing and a robust sense of the absurd, each story iis a self-contained adventure, steeped in the heady mix of tragedy and danger, excitement and hope, that characterizes countries in transition. Through Fountain's rounded and novelistic prose, these intelligent and keenly observed stories are painted in provocative and vibrant detail across a global canvas.

What Others Have To Say:

Salon
"The writing is literary and earnest, full of foreign languages and settings, and unusual and lovely words"

Austin Chronicle
"...Fountain seems to be exploring something vital, his characters acting as acknowledgments of the global community and the complications of being an American in the world at large."

The New York Times
"Rather than glamorize his protagonists through their ties to troubled lands, he humanizes the troubled lands through their ties to his unpretentious protagonists."

Manila Times
"...each story was crafted with richness that can only come from a good mix of searing passion and cold-hearted objectivity."

Line By Line: E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

"And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

"Everybody that went away suffered a broken heart. "I'm coming back some day," they all wrote. But never did. The old life was too small to fit anymore."

"Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt like he was a pin in the hinge of power."

"A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction."

"If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he
had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it."