the sixty-eighth book in the visitor recommendation series;
suggested by Phil Tatro

After I read the author’s note that opens the book, I assumed that this would be another one I’d bail on early: Groff says that her novel is a love letter to her hometown of Cooperstown, New York, to which I have no connection, and draws heavily upon the work of James Fenimore Cooper, none of which I have read.  Nor did the first couple of chapters change my mind.  The first intro­duces the situation: Wilhelmina Upton, an archeology grad stu­dent at Stanford, returns home to Templeton, New York, a stand-in for Cooperstown, and tells her mother that her Ph.D. advisor has gotten her pregnant.  The second chapter jumps back to the late eighteenth century and presents an excerpt from the mem­oirs of Willie’s distant ancestor, Templeton founder Marmaduke Temple.  Chapter three skips us ahead to 1973, as Willie’s mother, age seventeen, returns home to Templeton from a hippie com­mune in San Francisco after her parents are killed in a car acci­dent⁠—and this is the chapter that made me think that maybe I’d stick this one out, because while no one thing happens that particularly piqued my interest, the chapter was well-written enough, and I had begun to gather that a knowledge of James Fenimore Cooper was unnecessary enough, that it was with some optimism that I continued on to chapter four.  And that was pret­ty much how I felt all the way to the end, which I got to pretty quickly, at least for me.  The main engine that drives the plot is that Willie’s mother reveals that Willie’s biological father was not an unknown hippie in San Francisco but a man who lived, and still lives, in Templeton⁠—but she won’t say who, and Willie attempts to unravel the mystery via historical research, which sends us bouncing back and forth in time, ping-ponging from one character to another.  That’s a pretty interesting structure⁠—I like historical research and multiple perspectives.  Aside from that, there wasn’t much I connected with, but again, it was a suffici­ently well-done page-turner that I cruised right through it de­spite that. 

I also couldn’t decide whether I should say “I liked this book despite the sea monster and the ghost” or whether I should say “I didn’t really connect with this book despite the sea monster and the ghost”.  So I elected not to say anything about the sea monster and the ghost at all.

You paged Alex: What is that word?
Alex pages: Awwwk! Word on the street is that that word is paraleipsis.

	comment on Tumblr	reply via email	support this site	return to the Calendar page