Synopses & Reviews
From the
New York Times bestselling author of
The Year We Left Home, a dazzling new novel already being hailed as an instantly addictive...tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.” (
Booklist)
After surviving a shooting at her high school, Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, who doesn't quite understand how he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen adolescent girl. Art's neighbor, Christie, is a nurse distracted by an eccentric patient, Mrs. Foster, who has given Christie the reins to her Humanity Project, a bizarre and well-endowed charity fund. Just as mysteriously, no one seems to know where Conner, the Foster's handyman, goes after work, but he has become the one person Linnea can confide in, perhaps because his own home life is a war zone: his father has suffered an injury and become addicted to painkillers. As these characters and many more hurtle toward their fates, the Humanity Project is born: 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.
Review
“[A] bracing narrative stance and a tart political viewpoint....[Thompson] is eerily good at inhabiting a wide range of perspectives and has a fine ear for the way young people speak to one another...a novel that doesn't pretend to have any answers, comfortable or otherwise, but that vividly, insistently poses questions we should be asking.” The New York Times
Review
“Thompson achieves exceptional clarity and force in this instantly addictive, tectonically shifting novel. As always, her affection and compassion for her characters draw you in close, as does her imaginative crafting of precarious situations and moments of sheer astonishment....Thompson infuses her characters bizarre, terrifying, and instructive misadventures with hilarity and profundity as she considers the wild versus the civilized, the “survival of the richest,” how and why we help and fail each other, and what it might mean to “build an authentic spiritual self.” Thompson is at her tender and scathing best in this tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.” Booklist, starred review
Review
“[A] penetrating vision of a lower-middle-class family sinking fast....Thompson has a knack for rendering characters who are emotionally fluid but of a piece [and] caps the story with a smart twist ending that undoes many of the certainties the reader arrived at in the preceding pages. A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives.” Kirkus, starred review
Review
“[Humanity is] something that Thompson infuses into every sentence, striking true, clear notes...and telling [characters'] stories in a way that doesn't offer resolutions so much as a messy, imperfect kind of grace. And what's more human than that?” Entertainment Weekly
Review
“In prose that is gorgeously written but never showy...The Humanity Project rewards readers with the kind of immersive, thought-provoking experience that only expert storytelling can provide.” Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review
“[I]t's Thompson's own humanity project that's really interesting, heartfelt and farther-reaching...a tribute to Jean Thompson's art, which, beginning so slowly and seemingly simply, expands and deepens to contain multitudes without ever losing sight of each singular soul.” Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
“With godlike power, Jean Thompson, author of The Humanity Project, throws her dented (and entirely recognizable) characters into the crucible of the American recession to reveal what it means to be human: flawed, and yet somehow worthy of redemption that comes in glimmers instead of bursts.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Review
“Virtue is thin on the ground in Ms. Thompson's book, which follows the disparate lives of a handful of Northern Californians loosely tied together by coincidence and united more firmly by their ethical lapses....Ms. Thompson neither wallows [in] hardships nor sentimentalizes the grubby, compromised realities....Her lucid, no-frills prose gives her depictions of the other half the stamp of authenticity.” Wall Street Journal
Review
“The Humanity Project, the prolific Jean Thompson's sixth novel, weaves a rich, moving story of parents and children, money and poverty, virtue and evil....Thompson manages this complicated choreography masterfully.” Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe
Review
“[E]vocative [and] often colored by a smart, dark humor....Conflicted, complex and compassionate when you least expect it: That's us in a nutshell — and in Thompson's ultimately profound novel.” The Miami Herald
Review
“Thompson has crafted an incisive yet tender novel — a disturbing portrait of a thoroughly modern, fractured family stumbling toward grace in difficult times.” People
Synopsis
New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home Jean Thompson delivers a dazzling new novel to her beloved fans — set against the backdrop of current events and cultural calamity, The Humanity Project follows an eclectic cast of characters whose fates are drawn together by one woman’s unusual financial experiment.
About the Author
Jean Thompson is the author of five previous novels, among them The Year We Left Home, City Boy (a National Book Award finalist), and Wide Blue Yonder; and five story collections. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.