Overview:
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home, a dazzling new novel already being hailed as an “instantly addictive...tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.” (Booklist)
The many protagonists in Jean Thompson's The Humanity Project are, for the most part, complete messes: They're broke, lonely, adrift, and traumatized; they've seen their dreams sour and their luck dissipate. A few don't even make it past the first 50 pages alive.
But "humanity" isn't just a vague focus of the charitable foundation begun by one of the novel's few financially solvent characters, a slightly batty Bay Area widow named Mrs. Foster. It's something that Thompson infuses into every sentence, striking true, clear notes whether she's writing about the hissing colony of feral cats trapped inside Mrs. Foster's palatial house or the inner life of Linnea, a sullen Ohio teenager sent to live with her long-absent father in Marin County after she survives a brutal school shooting. The people Linnea meets there — including Conner, a handsome, taciturn boy whose relationship with his invalid father drives every choice he makes, and her downstairs neighbor Christie, a thirtysomething nurse struggling to feel connected to anything — aren't in much better shape than she is, even though they wake up every day in a place famous for its embarrassment of natural riches and New Age enlightenment. Though the project of the title draws all of them toward one another, it's not really the point of the novel, or at least not one that Thompson fully follows through on. She's too interested in threading through these patchwork lives, and telling their stories in a way that doesn't offer resolutions so much as a messy, imperfect kind of grace. And what's more human than that?
"A Masterpiece..."
-- Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune
“A bracing narrative stance and a tart political viewpoint....[Thompson] is eerily good at inhabiting a wide range of perspectives and has a fine ear for the way young people speak to one another.... a novel that doesn’t pretend to have any answers, comfortable or otherwise, but that vividly, insistently poses questions we should be asking.”
—Suzanne Berne, The New York Times
“Thompson achieves exceptional clarity and force in this instantly addictive, tectonically shifting novel. As always, her affection and compassion for her characters draw you in close, as does her imaginative crafting of precarious situations and moments of sheer astonishment....Thompson infuses her characters’ bizarre, terrifying, and instructive misadventures with hilarity and profundity as she considers the wild versus the civilized, the “survival of the richest,” how and why we help and fail each other, and what it might mean to “build an authentic spiritual self.” Thompson is at her tender and scathing best in this tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.”
—Booklist, starred review
“A penetrating vision of a lower-middle-class family sinking fast....Thompson has a knack for rendering characters who are emotionally fluid but of a piece [and] caps the story with a smart twist ending that undoes many of the certainties the reader arrived at in the preceding pages. A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“Humanity is something that Thompson infuses into every sentence, striking true, clear notes...and telling [characters'] stories in a way that doesn't offer resolutions so much as a messy, imperfect kind of grace. And what's more human than that?”—Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
“In prose that is gorgeously written but never showy...The Humanity Project rewards readers with the kind of immersive, thought-provoking experience that only expert storytelling can provide.”
—Justin Glanville, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“It’s Thompson’s own humanity project that’s really interesting, heartfelt and farther-reaching....a tribute to Jean Thompson’s art, which, beginning so slowly and seemingly simply, expands and deepens to contain multitudes without ever losing sight of each singular soul.”—Ellen Akins, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“With godlike power, Jean Thompson, author of The Humanity Project, throws her dented (and entirely recognizable) characters into the crucible of the American recession to reveal what it means to be human: flawed, and yet somehow worthy of redemption that comes in glimmers instead of bursts.”—Christi Clancy, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Virtue is thin on the ground in Ms. Thompson's book, which follows the disparate lives of a handful of Northern Californians loosely tied together by coincidence and united more firmly by their ethical lapses....Ms. Thompson neither wallows [in] hardships nor sentimentalizes the grubby, compromised realities...Her lucid, no-frills prose gives her depictions of the other half the stamp of authenticity.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“The Humanity Project, the prolific Jean Thompson’s sixth novel, weaves a rich, moving story of parents and children, money and poverty, virtue and evil....Thompson manages this complicated choreography masterfully.”
—Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
“Evocative [and] often colored by a smart, dark humor...Conflicted, complex and compassionate when you least expect it: That’s us in a nutshell—and in Thompson’s ultimately profound novel.”
—Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald
“Thompson has crafted an incisive yet tender novel—a disturbing portrait of a thoroughly modern, fractured family stumbling toward grace in difficult times.”
—Meredith Maran, People
“A forthright piece of social criticism...Thompson is also an accomplished story writer...attuned to the callousness of 21st-century society, its comedic elements, its misguided efforts to right itself, its often tragic results....There’s real beauty in the way Thompson has [characters] serve one another, even if that loving service is often not enough. It is, however, deeply human.”
—Helen Schulman, The New York Times Book Review
"...Ambitious and ... captivating... luscious and evocative...Thompson is a writer attuned to the callousness of 21st-century society, its comedic elements, its misguided efforts to right itself, its often tragic results."
-- Helen Shulman, New York Times
"Thompson's thoughtful new novel ponders the sins we commit in the name of love and our capacity for compassion...Thompson asks what can we actually do to change the lives of others, and investigates the value of good intentions, finding answers in the emotional lives of richly-drawn characters who do what they must–and what they think they must—in order to help the ones they love."
-- Publishers Weekly
"Conflicted, complex and compassionate when you least expect it: That’s us in a nutshell — and in Thompson’s ultimately profound novel."
-- Connie Ogle, Miami Herald
"...A swirl of sad and happy, humor and pain...a rich, moving story of parents and children, money and poverty, virtue and evil."
-- Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
Thompson achieves exceptional clarity and force in this instantly addictive, tectonically shifting novel...Thompson infuses her characters' bizarre, terrifying, and instructive misadventures with ilarity and profundity as she considers the wild versus the civilized, 'the survival of the richest,' how and why we help and fail each other, and what it might mean to 'build and authentic spiritual self.' Thompson is at her tender and scathing best in this tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.”
-- Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"Superb and unforced...A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: a formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives."
-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their
Fellow Men!
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