Staff Book Review

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

This is a debut novel, but as debut novels go, it's a remarkable one. In this case, I found about it from a January booksellers' meeting. So many books emerge at any given time that it becomes necessary to figure out which you might really enjoy. The publisher's rep spoke eloquently and I responded.

Templeton is Cooperstown, and the Monsters of Templeton- including a aquatic monster that surfaces and an assortment of descendents of Marmaduke Temple (James Fenimore Cooper), who are revealed as less than wonderful. Like Cooperstown, Templeton has a Baseball Hall of Fame, but baseball and sea serpents are the least of the weirdness, although they do enhance the scenery.

The heroine of the novel, failed grad student Willie Upton, returns home pregnant, having been caught in a romantic triangle with her Anthropology professor and having tried to run over the prof's wife. Now she has to face her past, including her former hippie mom, Vivianne, who sets her the task of figuring out which of Templeton's fine citizens is her father.

This sends Willie into a long investigation of Temple family geneology, which by itself would not hold a reader's interest for long without a mystery and a villain or two. The people on the family tree and their descendents who still inhabit Templeton turn out to be both monstrous and very human, holding the most interest of all. There's the drama of a young woman trying to find herself, and her discoveries that help her figure out her place on the vast Temple family tree. There's the relationship between mother and daughter. There's the nuanced portrait of a town that lives on its past, which should hit home with anyone who has lived in a historical setting that tries to survive in the current day.

Not to give away the solution, it is a very satisfying one, and the novel sticks in your mind for its complexity, its sense of humor, and the persistent and lovable Willie. It won't be out in paperback until February of 2009, but it may be one that will signal the beginning of an illustrious career.

Book Review by Janet Loveland at Cranesbill Books

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