Literary Fiction Book Review is offering a discussion guide for my novel. The guide is aimed at Young Adult fiction readers as well as the over twenty crowd.
Why select Locus Amoenus for your book club read?
- It’s funny and fast-paced
- Set in a typical small American town, many readers will relate to it
- It will engage readers in important debates
- Shakespeare’s fans will love the allusions
- Readers unfamiliar with the bard may be inspired to read his play
In this dark comedy, a 9/11 widow and her son, Hamlet, try to run a sustainable farm while their neighbors prefer the starchy products of industrial agriculture. Hamlet, now eighteen, suspects that something is rotten in the United States, where health, happiness, and freedom are traded for cheap Walmart goods, Paxil, endless war, standard curriculum, and environmental degradation. Then, on the 8th anniversary of his father’s death, Hamlet’s mother marries a bureaucrat named Claudius, and Horatio, a conspiracy theorist, arrives to tell him Claudius is a fraud. The deceptions, spying, and corruption ultimately lead, as in Shakespeare’s play, to tragedy. Though Alexander’s novella presents a dystopian picture, readers will laugh out loud at the familiar absurdity of life in America and will relish the lyrical and clever writing that makes Shakespeare’s themes contemporary.
Get the discussion guide here.