Tournament of Books discussion

The Guest Room by Chris Bohjalian

About the Book: (source: Amazon.com)
From the New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls comes the spellbinding tale of a party gone horribly wrong: two men lie dead in a suburban living room, two women are on the run from police, and a marriage is ripping apart at the seams.

When Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard, host his brother’s bachelor party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery. She brings their young daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her Westchester home to the men and their hired entertainment. What she does not expect is this: bacchanalian drunkenness, her husband sharing a dangerously intimate moment in the guest room, and two women stabbing and killing their Russian bodyguards before driving off into the night.

In the aftermath, Kristin and Richard’s life rapidly spirals into nightmare. The police throw them out of their home, now a crime scene, Richard’s investment banking firm puts him on indefinite leave, and Kristin is unsure if she can forgive her husband for the moment he shared with a dark-haired girl in the guest room. But the dark-haired girl, Alexandra, faces a much graver danger. In one breathless, violent night, she is free, running to escape the police who will arrest her and the gangsters who will kill her in a heartbeat. A captivating, chilling story about shame and scandal, The Guest Room is a riveting novel from one of our greatest storytellers.

About the Author: (source: www.chrisbohjalian.com)
Lincoln, Vermont’s Chris Bohjalian is the author of 18 books, most of which were New York Times bestsellers. His work has been translated into over 30 languages and three times become movies.

His most recent novel, "The Guest Room," a story of a human trafficking, a marriage in crisis, and two remarkable women, was published earlier this year.

His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Bookpage, and Salon…..

...He has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. He was a weekly columnist in Vermont for the Burlington Free Press from 1992 through 2015.

Chris graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife, the photographer Victoria Blewer.

Twitter handle: @ChrisBohjalian

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Happy reading!!

I read this book a while ago. I liked it but didn't love it; I thought the characters were for the most part either unbelievably virtuous or cartoonishly evil.

It was a little preachy, too.

I'm DNF'ing this one. Feels like an 'issue' book that's exploitative when it's about the victimized women, and 'oh no these oppressed people intruded on my comfortable suburban life' when it's not.

I'm with Heather in the like, didn't love camp. And I'm not sure how I felt about the use of language for Alexandra. Such a combination of dropped articles, unsophisticated vocabulary, and overdone artlessness. (Oh, wait, maybe I do know how I feel about it.)

Kristin was the best character, because she's allowed to exist in the space between "unbelievably virtuous" and "cartoonishly evil."

Has anyone read other books by Bohjalian? I've heard of him, possibly have a title or two of his somewhere in my house, but haven't read him before. Does he always do this "Here Is An Issue To Explore" thing? It reminded me of Picoult, before I got tired of her Life Lessons and stopped reading her.

I've actually read a lot of his books; he is very much like. male Jodi Picoult...very good writer (and yes, I do think Picoult is very talented) but gets to be too preachy and too formulaic the more you read of him. He tries to mix it up more than Picoult overall though; a few of his novels definitely stray from the "hot issue of the month" formula.

it should say "like a male Jodi Picoult" up there...new phone + new Goodreads app design = me not knowing how to edit my comments anymore.

Heather wrote: "it should say "like a male Jodi Picoult" up there...new phone + new Goodreads app design = me not knowing how to edit my comments anymore."

Oh dear, you almost prompted my Goodreads redesign rant. I am containing myself!

I agree, Picoult can write - I used to quite enjoy her. If I'd only read a couple of hers over the years, I wouldn't understand the negativity. The formula - so very Hot Issue & Thought-Provoking! - wore me down.

I had a hard time evaluating the Alexandra parts b/c I was listening on audio, and, having friends whose first language is Russian, the way that her speech was conveyed sounded 'off' to me, but I couldn't nail down exactly why.

It doesn't help I'd just read Anthony Marra's ' A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which has a character in a similar situation and is just feels much more thoughtful (and better written). Though it wasn't the Alexandra bits that turned me off so much as it being framed mostly about the disruption of middle class American lives. Which may be an effective way to reach an audience (and may be subverted later in the book) but I just didn't get that far.