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The Monsters of Templeton Lauren Groff 9780434017843 Books

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The Monsters of Templeton Lauren Groff 9780434017843 Books

What an amazing, creative and outright original book! (And it was Lauren Groff's first novel, too.) This is a two-dimensional story; one part takes place in the present day, while the other takes place some 200 years ago.

Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, who goes by Willie, is 28 and working on her PhD in anthropology at Stanford. After a passionate affair with her adviser in the tundra of Alaska when they are on a dig, she is pregnant and returns home to Templeton, New York. This idyllic town with a very large lake that is hundreds of feet deep, is modeled on Cooperstown. The day a bedraggled Willie rolls into town, a dead prehistoric "monster" surfaces on the lake.

Willie's mother, Vi, is an aging hippie-turned-born again Christian, who has always told Willie that her father was one of three men with whom she lived in a house in San Francisco in the '60s. It turns out that isn't true. Willie's dad is a man who lives in Templeton. Willie now has a quest: Find out the name of her father.

Fasten your seatbelts, reader. You are in for a ride. Monsters aren't the only thing in Templeton. And some monsters aren't quite as easy to see as the one that came out of the lake.

P.S. Lauren Groff should get some sort of award for the characters' names. Here is just a sampling: Marmaduke Templeton, Noname, Minnie Phinney, Primus Dwyer and Asterisk Upton…just to name a few. And they are as quirky and original as their names!


Tags : The Monsters of Templeton [Lauren Groff] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Author's first novel. Weird fantasy.,Lauren Groff,The Monsters of Templeton,Hyperion,0434017841,Fiction,General,Modern fiction

The Monsters of Templeton Lauren Groff 9780434017843 Books Reviews

Groff is most impressive in giving you the nuanced needs and responses to the human psyche and heart. In all of her novels there is a thin veil between appearances and the essential being of her central character(s). It works for me because she is such a good writer and so very smart. MONSTERS is not quite FATES but that does not make it less than first-rate/
well, this book has many flavors, but the strongest is love.

love of, and love from the lake monster is first and foremost.
it is hinted at subtly throughout, but brought home beautifully with increasing definition and clarity through the ending chapters.

love of the town itself is next.
love of its layout, its surrounding geography and weather, its history and architecture, and most of all how its inhabitants intertwine with its beauty through the years to build its character and mystery.

as a side note, any author who draws or otherwise commissions such detailed maps of their imagination, whether it's at the scale of a town like Templeton (or Hobbiton, or Derry), the surrounding region, or the encompassing world, is someone who's spent time there, and is thus a messenger to whom we need to pay attention.

finally, love of its people.
this quality may pale somewhat in comparison to the previous two, but the story shows that despite love of the monster and the town, the people love each other too, in various and diverse ways, as depicted in an intriguingly long back-history, and even somewhat ambiguously into the present.

overall, completely surprising, and something that grows on you over time.

just like real love.
I love Lauren's multiple approaches to fleshing her story out. I'm always caught by surprise by new things that pop up from different characters' perspectives - which is awesome, because EVERYTHING in life is seen in many unique ways, & no one ever really knows 100% of any situation. Lauren's characters are wonderfully multifaceted themselves, & it's very engrossing & fun getting to know them. I have read - so far - one other book by Lauren Groff, "Fates & Furies" - which I also love. I look forward to reading more by her. )
"The Monsters of Templeton" is an amazing read! The title hits home on so many levels that it's sometimes a bit confusing. Don't let that scare you. If you were bright enough to buy the book, you are bright enough to never ignore Laura Groff. Her imagination is as close to perfection as anything possibly can be. Her descriptive language and skill will steal your breathe, as you pause briefly, with the book laid upon your chest, and contemplate the sentence, paragraph, chapter that seems to have been painted in all the wrong colors, on purpose, for in the colors you are used to expecting, you lose your way as to what it could mean if you looked at it, really looked at it, in a different way. Lauren Groff is a thrill, and "The Monsters of Templeton" is a read you shouldn't allow yourself to skip.
What an amazing, creative and outright original book! (And it was Lauren Groff's first novel, too.) This is a two-dimensional story; one part takes place in the present day, while the other takes place some 200 years ago.

Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, who goes by Willie, is 28 and working on her PhD in anthropology at Stanford. After a passionate affair with her adviser in the tundra of Alaska when they are on a dig, she is pregnant and returns home to Templeton, New York. This idyllic town with a very large lake that is hundreds of feet deep, is modeled on Cooperstown. The day a bedraggled Willie rolls into town, a dead prehistoric "monster" surfaces on the lake.

Willie's mother, Vi, is an aging hippie-turned-born again Christian, who has always told Willie that her father was one of three men with whom she lived in a house in San Francisco in the '60s. It turns out that isn't true. Willie's dad is a man who lives in Templeton. Willie now has a quest Find out the name of her father.

Fasten your seatbelts, reader. You are in for a ride. Monsters aren't the only thing in Templeton. And some monsters aren't quite as easy to see as the one that came out of the lake.

P.S. Lauren Groff should get some sort of award for the characters' names. Here is just a sampling Marmaduke Templeton, Noname, Minnie Phinney, Primus Dwyer and Asterisk Upton…just to name a few. And they are as quirky and original as their names!