The Humanity Project
A Novel
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- $129.00
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- $129.00
Descripción editorial
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home and A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl, this dazzling novel is hailed as an “instantly addictive...tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.” (Booklist)
After surviving a horrific shooting at her high school, fifteen-year-old Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, in California. Art, not much more than a child himself, doesn’t quite understand how or why he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen—and probably deeply damaged—adolescent girl. And although Linnea has little interest in her father, she becomes fascinated by the eccentric cast of characters surrounding him: Conner, a local handyman whose own home life is a war zone, and Christie, her neighbor, who has just been given the reins to a bizarrely named charity fund, the Humanity Project. As the Fund gains traction and Linnea begins to heal, the Humanity Project begs the question: Can you indeed pay someone to be good? At what price?
Thompson proves herself at the height of her powers in The Humanity Project, crafting emotionally suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining characters, in which we inevitably see ourselves. Set against the backdrop of current events and cultural calamity, it is at once a multifaceted ensemble drama and a deftly observant story of our twenty-first-century society.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thompson's thoughtful new novel ponders the sins we commit in the name of love and our capacity for compassion. The "detached" life of San Francisco bay area nurse Christie, divorced and in her thirties, is thrown into motion when Mrs. Foster, a wealthy patient, asks her to lead her charity, whose aim is to "benefit humanity" by paying "people to be good." Christie's neighbor, Art, already struggling with adulthood, takes in his troubled teenage daughter, Linnea, after she survives a school shooting in the Midwest. Though her move to California is not the quick fix Linnea's mother had hoped for, Linnea does connect with Conner, a teenage boy from another broken, troubled home, calling their bond an "accidental, lost-in-space collision" and the two of them "a pair of separately damaged goods." The disappearance of Conner's father finally brings these disparate characters together. Thompson (The Year We Left Home) asks what can we actually do to change the lives of others, and investigates the value of good intentions, finding answers in the emotional lives of richly-drawn characters who do what they must and what they think they must in order to help the ones they love.
