Astonish Me

Astonish Me

by Maggie Shipstead
Astonish Me

Astonish Me

by Maggie Shipstead

Paperback

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Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle comes "a novel you must read" (The Washington Post) about a mother who is trying to forget her past as a young ballerina in Paris who fell into a passionate romance with a Soviet dance superstar.

For years Joan has been trying to find peace and satisfaction in her role as wife and mother. Few in her drowsy California suburb know her thrilling history: as a young American ballerina in Paris, she had a doomed affair with Soviet dance superstar Arslan Rusakov.

After playing a leading role in his celebrated defection, Joan bowed out of the spotlight for good, heartbroken by Arslan and humbled by her own modest career. But when her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy, Joan is pulled back into a world she thought she'd left behind—a world of dangerous secrets, of Arslan, and of longing for what will always be just out of reach.

“The inner lives of [Shipstead’s] characters feel as real and immediate as the shifting settings they inhabit: still-gritty mid-1970s Manhattan, shabbily elegant Paris, the sunbaked suburban sprawl of Southern California.” —Entertainment Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780345804617
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date: 01/06/2015
Series: Vintage Contemporaries
Pages: 272
Sales rank: 188,634
Product dimensions: 5.19(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

About The Author
MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her first novel, Seating Arrangements, was a New York Times best seller, a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the winner of the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction.

Read an Excerpt

February 1973—Paris
(Continues…)



Excerpted from "Astonish Me"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Maggie Shipstead.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Astonish Me, Maggie Shipstead’s first novel since her award-winning, national best-selling debut, Seating Arrangements.

1. What does “Astonish me” mean, as a metaphor in the novel?

2. Who is the main character? Is that person also the hero?

3. Shipstead skips forward and backward in time throughout the novel. How does she use these leaps to fill in the story?

4. “Elaine ingests a steady but restricted diet of cocaine without apparent consequence. The key, she has said to Joan, is control. Control is the key to everything.” (page 8) What does Elaine mean by “control”? Which characters in the novel lose control, and to what effect?

5. Jacob wants to live “an intentional life” but doesn’t really know what he intends. The dancers have been taught that “going through the motions” is preferable (page 42). What role does intent really play in their lives? How does this connect to the notion of control?

6. And how does the perfectionism required of ballet dancers play into intent and control?

7. On page 54, Jacob tells Joan, “Every family has a mythology.” What is his mythology for their family? How does Joan’s secret endanger it?

8. Is Joan’s aggressive pursuit of Arslan out of character for her? Why does she do it?

9. Throughout the novel, characters wonder why Arslan chose Joan to help him defect. Why do you think he chose her?

10. How does Sandy shape her daughter’s future? What effect does her behavior at Disneyland have?

11. “I think things can be true even if they didn’t really happen,” Jacob says on page 144. What does he mean by this? How does it play out in his family’s life?

12. When Joan says to Chloe, “Ballet isn’t about you” (page 180), what does she mean? If ballet requires losing oneself, how does it also lead to selfish behavior off-stage?

13. Jacob adored Joan from childhood; Harry adored Chloe from childhood. How else does the younger generation resemble the older one? How do they differ?

14. Why do Harry’s feelings for Chloe change?

15. Discuss the roles of nature vs. nurture. Which is more important in Harry’s life? What about for Chloe?

16. What does “parent” mean, in terms of the novel? Which characters make good parents?

17. What is the metaphor of Emma Livry, the ballet dancer whose tutu catches fire?

18. Shipstead shows us how Jacob reacts to Ludmilla’s phone call, but we don’t see Harry’s reaction. How do you imagine it went?

19. What does Rodina, the title of Arslan and Chloe’s ballet, mean? (In Russia, it refers to “motherland.”)

20. Do you think Jacob decides to stay through the end of the performance?

21. What do we learn from section V? How does it affect your understanding of the novel?

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