Harriet Wolfs Seventh Book of Wonder..., Julianna Baggott
Harriet Wolfs Seventh Book of Wonder..., Julianna Baggott
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Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders
A Novel

Author: Julianna Baggott

Narrator: Jodi Carlisle

Unabridged: 10 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/18/2015


Synopsis

"A mesmerizing tale of star-crossed love and of the dark secrets in a fracturing family . . . This novel is so full of wonders that it leaves you haunted, amazed, and, like every great read, irrevocably changed." -- Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You

The reclusive Harriet Wolf, revered author and family matriarch, has a final confession: a love story. Years after her death, as her family comes together one last time, the mystery of Harriet's life hangs in the balance. Does the truth lie in the rumored final book of the series that made Harriet a world-famous writer, or will her final confession be lost forever?

Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders tells the moving story of the unforgettable Wolf women in four distinct voices: the mysterious Harriet, who, until now, has never revealed the secrets of her past; her fiery, overprotective daughter, Eleanor; and her two grown granddaughters -- Tilton, the fragile yet exuberant younger sister, who's become a housebound hermit, and Ruth, the older sister, who ran away at sixteen and never looked back.

When Eleanor is hospitalized, Ruth decides it's time to do right by a pact she made with Tilton long ago: to return home and save her sister. Meanwhile, Harriet whispers her true life story to the reader. It's a story that spans the entire twentieth century and is filled with mobsters, outcasts, a lonesome lion, and a home for wayward women. It's also a tribute to her lifelong love of the boy she met at the Maryland School for Feeble-minded Children.

Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders, Julianna Baggott's most sweeping and mesmerizing novel yet, offers a profound meditation on motherhood and sisterhood, as well as on the central importance of stories. It is a novel that affords its characters that rare chance we all long for -- the chance to reimagine the stories of our lives while there's still time.

About Julianna Baggott

Julianna Baggott is a poet and the author of several novels for adult readers, including Girl Talk, The Madam, and The Miss America Family, as well as Which Brings Me to You, cowritten with Steve Almond. As the pseudonymous N. E. Bode, she has written The Slippery Map, The Anybodies, The Nobodies, and The Somebodies. She lives with her family in Tallahassee, Florida.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Debra on January 10, 2019

"This is how the story goes: I was born dead - or so my mother was told" Harriet Wolf was a famous novelist and recluse. Her daughter and granddaughters frequently get questioned by her fans about her books. There is a rumor circulating that she has a final manuscript and the public is curious if it......more

Goodreads review by Barbara on September 27, 2015

This novel opens in the voice of Harriet Wolf, providing the reader with the information that she was born in 1900, mute, tiny, and bleeding from the nose. The attending physician told her father that she “wasn’t fit”, so her father asked the Dr to take her away to the Maryland School for the Feeble......more

Goodreads review by Melissa on May 13, 2016

**4.5** Where to begin with a book so rich and full? Let’s start with the beginning lines: “I was born dead – or so my mother was told …I was mute and sallow and already a bleeder, one red bead poised at each nostril.” For me, it’s this kind of intrigue and beautiful use of language that drew me in i......more

Goodreads review by Ron on August 26, 2015

Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman” isn’t the first “found” manuscript to capture the public’s attention, but has any other literary discovery ever generated such boundless frenzy? You can bet editors and publishers have noticed. That rustling you hear is the sound of scholars rifling through special c......more


Quotes

Praise for Pure

"Pure is not just the most extraordinary coming-of-age novel I've ever read, it is also a beautiful and savage metaphorical assessment of how all of us live in this present age. This is an important book by one of our finest writers."—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winner

"A great gorgeous whirlwind of a novel, boundless in its imagination. You will be swept away."—Justin Cronin, New York Times bestselling author of The Passage

Praise for The Madam

"A poet has transformed a piece of history into a luminous and epic piece of literature; it's as if John Irving and Djuna Barnes had collaborated, each bringing to the page the fiery best of their various gifts, the dark and lyrical and bizarre and sexual and comical and violent and mysterious and supremely heart-breaking spectacle of wide, wild lives rendered vividly before our eyes."—Antonya Nelson

"Beautifully rendered, this story is as brave and unique and full of surprises as the madam portrayed within it."—Elizabeth Strout, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

"Few writers of the twenty-first century can rival the verve, the energy and the sheer delight in language of Julianna Baggott. Profoundly different from anything she has done before, The Madam is an extraordinary novel which will open a whole new phase of what already looks like a brilliant career."—Madison Smartt Bell

Praise for The Miss America Family

"Julianna Baggott enjoys living on the knife edge between hilarity and heartbreak and that makes her a writer after my own heart."—Richard Russo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Praise for Girl Talk