Reading the Western Landscape Community Book Discussion

“I just love the way that right from the first pages…[the] characters jump off the page and in this case Sugar Lacey makes her grand entrance, dragging her suitcase, strutting through the small town of the deep south, Bigelow, Arkansas (1950’s) in her high heels, tight dress, brightly coloured wig and nonchalant attitude, peering through the window of the hairdresser knowing that would be where all the talk happens, and on to number 10 Grove Street, her new abode, right next door to Pearl and Joe….McFadden is an author who I will happily read all her work, there’s something reliable and comforting when you sit down with one of her works, knowing you’re not going to want to put it down until it’s finished, but forcing yourself to do so, because you want the experience to linger.”— Claire Mcalpine, clairemcalpine.com,

“In a debut novel that blends the rich, earthy atmosphere of the deep South and a voice imbued with spiritual grace, Bernice L. McFadden tells the story of two women: a modest, churchgoing wife and mother, and the young prostitute she befriends.” “When Sugar arrives in 1950s Bigelow – waltzing down the main square of the sweltering tiny Arkansas town as if she has every right to be there – no one tosses out the welcome mat or invites her in for a Coke. The Bigelow women hate her from the minute they lay eyes on her – on the bouncing blond wig and red-painted lips that tell them she has never known a hard day’s work. All they know is they want her gone, out of their town, and away from their men.” “But Sugar has traveled too far and survived too much to back down now. She parks herself in the house at #10 Grove Street, even though she feels there is something about Bigelow that is calling up the past she prayed she’d left behind.” “Deep in her soul, Pearl Taylor knows what it is that Sugar feels, because it happened to her. It was the day her world shut down, the day the devil himself murdered her young daughter, Jude. It wasn’t that Pearl stopped believing in God, exactly; she just couldn’t trust him the way she used to. Then Sugar moves in next door, and Pearl’s life irrevocably changes. Over sweet potato pie, an unlikely friendship begins, transforming the lives of two women – and an entire community.”–Book Jacket

[W]e are thrown right into the action with no explanation of who anyone is or what exactly they are doing. The novel is a rollercoaster… And then book two starts and we find out how Dick and Nicole met. And it’s calm, beautiful reading that reminds us that those characters once had an easier and happier life. This is where Fitzgerald shines and really introduces you to the most beautiful sentences in literature. [The book]is not as accessible as The Great Gatsby, but once you break through, it’s also more beautiful. The story of a couple having and losing love is heartbreaking and Fitzgerald masters the language as no one else to tell this story.”— Emma Holtrust, The Beauty of Literature

Set in the south of France in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic tale of a young actress, Rosemary Hoyt, and her complicated relationship with the alluring American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth pushed him into a glamorous lifestyle, and whose growing strength highlights Dick’s decline. Lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative, Tender Is the Night was one of the most talked-about books of the year when it was originally published in 1934, and is even more beloved by readers today.

…[This] should be added to this growing cannon of writing by women that reexamines women’s relationship to nature…[T]he … protagonists are not so much struggling against nature as coming to terms with the possibility that their fundamental humanness is inseparable from the … the natural world. T]he collection pivot[s] on misperception, both of self & of others, & on betrayals, some purposeful, some accidental…[She] … reveals the interior mechanisms, the psyches, that drive her … protagonists to make the choices they do. [S]he … creates characters whose personalities & choices seem at once very human & clearly woven into the fabric of a larger natural order…[and] … are always gripping, near perfect in their construction, and often wondrous..”— Hasanthika Sirisena, Fiction Writers Review

From a lightning death on an isolated peak to the intrigues of a small town orchestra, the glimmering stories in this debut collection explore how nature–damaged, fierce, and unpredictable–worms its way into our lives. Here moths steal babies, a creek seduces a lonely suburban mother, and the priorities of a passionate conservationist are thrown into confusion after the death of her son. Over and over, the natural world reveals itself to be unknowable, especially to the people who study it most. These tales of scientists, nurses, and firefighters catalog the loneliness within families, betrayals between friends, and the recurring song of regret and grief.