Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant

On Thursday, January 15, 2008 at 6:30 PM, the Darlington book group will meet at the branch to discuss Anita Diamant's The Last Days of Dogtown. Call 410-638-3750 for details.

The Last Days of Dogtown is set near Gloucester, Massachussetts, and is loosely based on a true story of a real place called Dogtown Commons.

This Booklist reviewer of June 1, 2005 sums up the book very well, giving just enough information to intrigue without giving away the secret at the center of the story:

"In the early days of the nineteenth century, a declining hamlet nicknamed Dogtown by detractors houses a pack of semi-feral dogs and an eclectic group of residents too stubborn, too poverty stricken, too worn down, or too old to relocate. As the interrelated stories of these unfortunate souls are recounted, the reader is irresistibly drawn into their orbit, becoming emotionally invested in both their individual and their collective lives. Widows, witches, spinsters, whores, abused and neglected children, freed slaves, and one particularly odious villain populate the ramshackle dwellings that dot the ruggedly stark landscape. At the center of these heart-wrenching sagas is Judy Rhines, a kindhearted middle-aged maiden who harbors a secret so passionate and so scandalous its revelation would bring her instant ruin and tear the moribund town apart. One by one, both the animal and the human characters die or move away, sealing the inevitable fate of the doomed community."

Conversation Starters:

"Diamant adeptly manages to evoke the minutiae of everyday living..."

"Diamant... expertly weaves together seemingly disparate stories of a dying Massachusetts town into something greater than the sum of its parts."

Several characters stand out. Which characters did you like the most?

"Diamant has a gift for storytelling..."

"Diamant... throws almost too many people at us simultaneously in the opening chapter."

"Diamant quickly and obliquely sketches complex relationships among characters we have just met, which may be initially confusing or even annoying to some readers.

Characters are "richly imagined," "nasty," "creepily fascinating." Do you agree; and also do you agree that Diamant elicits sympathy for these hard-bitten characters?

About the author:

Anita Diamant's website

Anita Diamant on Dogtown

Publisher's Reading Group Guide

Kirkus gave Last Days a Starred Review and has this high praise for it: "This is a deeply satisfying novel, populated by people we care about, delineated in spare, elegant prose. Moving, absorbing and engaging: first-rate fiction that will appeal to the literary-minded as well as those in search of just a plain-old good read. " Don't miss this absorbing tale!

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

Valerie Ryan at Amazon.com wrote this about The Highest Tide: "This absolutely luminous first novel has all the earmarks of a classic. The Highest Tide is destined to be read, re-read, and to remain on bookshelves for the enjoyment of generations to come."

Find this book in our catalog.

The Darlington book group chose this for their discussion title in January 2007. I'm hoping that one of the group will comment on how the discussion went, as I can imagine that it sparked all sorts of side discussions on humankind's relationship with the natural world.

13-year-old Miles O'Malley is a naturalist and worshipper of Rachel Carson. One summer he obtains a licence to collect marine specimens for money from the mud flats of Skookumchuck Bay, at the South end of Puget Sound where he lives. One night he goes out in his kayak, coming eye to eye with, instead of his usual collectibles, a giant squid! In the book initially no one can credit Miles' discovery because no giant squids live in the Puget Sound and when humans have seen them elsewhere they have always been dead.

I wonder if the Darlington book group thrilled when they were reading this in January 2007, with the knowledge that in the real world only the previous December a giant squid had indeed been seen alive and had been captured on film? On December 22 this news article appeared on National Geographic News:

"December 22, 2006—Like pulling a shadow from the darkness, researchers in Japan have captured and filmed a live giant squid—likely for the first time—shedding new light on the famously elusive creatures. Tsunemi Kubodera, a scientist with Japan's National Science Museum, caught the 24-foot (7-meter) animal earlier this month near the island of Chichijima, some 600 miles (960 kilometers) southeast of Tokyo."

For pictures of the squid, see http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061222-giant-squid.html

In The Highest Tide the discovery of the live giant squid is confirmed by Professor Kramer, a biologist and Miles' friend, and then the unwelcome attention from scientists, camera crews and a local cult begins.

For Miles this was a bewildering summer. As the narrator he says, "People usually take decades to sort out their view of the universe, if they bother to sort at all. I did my sorting during one freakish summer in which I was ambushed by science, fame and suggestions of the divine."

Miles has a lot to cope with as he sorts his place out in the adult world. His parents are considering divorce, his elderly best friend, Florence is dying of a degenerative disease, his sex-obsessed buddy makes fun of his science knowledge, and he himself has a desperate crush on the 18-year-old girl next door, which humiliates him further. Tension builds as the date approaches of a predicted record high tide.

Here are some things you might consider when reading this book:

The coming of the high tide is obviously very important in the book. Do you think there is any symbolic significance to it, and if so, what is it?

The beauty and the complexity of nature informs the whole book. A reviewer at PW wrote, "The fertile strangeness of marine tidal life becomes a subtly executed metaphor for the bewilderments of adolescence ." Would you agree? Why else is nature important?

Author Jim Lynch's deep knowledge of and sense of wonder at the natural world gives him an ability to tell a story "that glows on every page"(Valerie Ryan). Would you agree? for instance, one early morning Miles says, "...the water was so clear I could see coon-stripe shrimp ... and the bottomless bed of white clam shells ... Those shells, as unique and timeless as bones, helped me realize that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light."

As Miles says when a reporter asks him why he thinks that the giant squid has turned up in Puget Sound, "Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something." Do you think the earth is meant to be telling us something in this book? Some reviewers have written that Jim Lynch was maybe trying to cram too much into a small book. What do you think?