The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

Of the many characters from the pastMarmaduke Temple, Davey Shipman, Charlotte and Cinnamon, Elizabeth Franklin Temple, to name a fewwhich one(s) stood out for you? Why?.What would you have done if you were in Willies position? Or in Viviennes? The day that Willie returns home, she decides to tell her the truth: that her father was a man in Templeton. For twenty-eight years, Vivienne has told her daughter that Willie was the product of a hippie commune.Do you think that The Monsters of Templeton could have taken place in any other locale? Why is the actual towns history so important to the books present-day events? How would the book have changed if she had decided to call the town Cooperstown? In the Authors Note, the author discusses writing about her hometown of Cooperstown, New York, and calling the fictional town Templeton.In what instances do ghosts make appearances in The Monsters of Templeton? What do the ghosts represent? What other symbols does the author employ in the novel? What do they mean?.Given her conflicted relationship with her mother and, to a lesser extent, with her hometown, why do you think Willie Upton decides to go back to Templeton? What was Willie looking for when she returned to Templeton? Does she find it?.Why are so many people in Templeton affected by the monsters death? What did the monster represent to them?

∺s soon as it died, our lives spiraled down, the Buds lament in Chapter 13, on the death of the Lake Glimmerglass monster (page 151).What did you think of the range of voices and time periods the author employs in The Monsters of Templeton? How would the novel have been different had the story been told from a single point of view, or been set in one era?.The questions below are designed to help guide your book groups discussion of this textured, compelling novel. Equal parts contemporary novel, historical fiction, and ghost story, The Monsters of Templeton plays with elements as diverse as the relationships between mothers and daughters, the costs of digging into the past in order to understand the present, and what it means to go home. In her debut novel, Lauren Groff tells the story of Willie Upton, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student who returns brokenhearted to her ancestral home in fictional Templeton, New York, after her world crumbles under her feet.

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff