The Humanity Project, Jean Thompson
The Humanity Project, Jean Thompson
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The Humanity Project

Author: Jean Thompson

Narrator: Tanya Eby

Unabridged: 11 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/23/2013


Synopsis

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 Fosters’ 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.

About Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson is the author of five novels, among them The Year We Left Home, City Boy (a National Book Award finalist), and Wide Blue Yonder, and five short story collections. She lives in Urbana, Illinois.


Reviews

A story about a man and son who spiral into homelessness; a teenage girl who witnesses a school shooting and is sent off to live with her Dad (because her stepfather is mad at her because she was NOT killed while his daughter was killed); a nurse who gets stuck getting involved in a crazy patient's......more

Goodreads review by Donna P

I wanted to like The Humanity Project. It is beautifully written, and many of the characters really tugged at my heartstrings, but in the end, there were some things that just didn't work for me. The book starts out very well. A 15-year-old girl, Linnea, witnesses a shooting at her high school, which......more

Goodreads review by Jill

Virtually all the characters in The Humanity Project are in the process of redefining who they are and what it means to be human. They’re lonely, adrift, down on their luck, trying to reinvent themselves…even rename themselves. Jean Thompson is first and foremost an outstanding short story writer, an......more

4.5 Loved this book from its opening sentence to its last. Like sitting in the driver's seat of an automated car, I had every confidence that Thompson would get us where we were going, all I had to do was enjoy the view as it rolled past. If nothing else, the structure of this novel is a thing of bea......more

Goodreads review by Mary

“The Humanity Project”, by the inimitable Jean Thompson, was published in 2013. It probably wasn’t wise of me to pick up a novel set during the last recession/mortgage crisis/school shooting when we’re in the midst of all that misery again now, but Jean Thompson’s novels are just too good to resist!......more