The Monsters of Templeton

Name: The Monsters of Templeton
Brand: Hachette Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Lauren Groff
ISBN: 9781401389154

Author: Lauren Groff

Narrator: Nicole Roberts

Unabridged: 13 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Published: 02/05/2008

Categories: Fiction

Synopsis

"The day I returned to Templeton steeped in disgrace, the fifty-foot corpse of a monster surfaced in Lake Glimmerglass." So begins The Monsters of Templeton, a novel spanning two centuries: part a contemporary story of a girl's search for her father, part historical novel, and part ghost story. In the wake of a disastrous love affair with her older, married archaeology professor at Stanford, brilliant Wilhelmina Cooper arrives back at the doorstep of her hippie mother-turned-born-again-Christian's house in Templeton, NY, a storybook town her ancestors founded that sits on the shores of Lake Glimmerglass. Upon her arrival, a prehistoric monster surfaces in the lake bringing a feeding frenzy to the quiet town, and Willie learns she has a mystery father her mother kept secret Willie's entire life. The beautiful, broody Willie is told that the key to her biological father's identity lies somewhere in her family's history, so she buries herself in the research of her twisted family tree and finds more than she bargained for as a chorus of voices from the town's past -- some sinister, all fascinating -- rise up around her to tell their side of the story. In the end, dark secrets come to light, past and present day are blurred, and old mysteries are finally put to rest. The Monsters of Templeton is a fresh, virtuoso performance that has placed Lauren Groff among the best writers of today.

About Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is the author of The Monsters of Templeton, which was short-listed for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her short stories have appeared in the anthologies Pushcart Prize XXXII, The Best American Short Stories 2007, and Best New American Voices 2008, as well as a number of journals, including the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and Five Points. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Reviews

Goodreads review by karen on July 08, 2018

yay!! my suspicions have been confirmed - i am officially not a book snob! i oscillate between thinking i might be a little bit of one, and that any forays i may make into teen fiction or silly bodice rippers that involve byron in some way are just accidents; flaws... on goodreads.com, i feel mostly......more

Goodreads review by Will on May 29, 2017

The author, a native of Cooperstown, NY has written a love tale to her town, renamed Templeton. The name was a nom de place used by James Fenimore Cooper for the town in his book The Pioneers. Wilhelmina (Willie) Upton has returned to town, pregnant, distraught, at a turning point in her life. Her m......more

Goodreads review by Katie on September 13, 2016

I finally abandoned this with only sixty pages to go. Abandoned it without learning the answer to the central question the book asks – who was my father? Because I realised I just couldn’t care. And because I was unable to distinguish most of the many characters from each other despite spending 400......more

Goodreads review by Peggy on December 21, 2007

God, sometimes I love my job! I commute two hours to and from work every day, and given current traffic conditions in the Austin area, you can go ahead and add at least another half hour to my drive home. I'll sometimes stop and grab a burger for dinner, going through the drive-through and then sitt......more

Goodreads review by Hannah on November 12, 2023

"...we need a mass of ancestors at our backs as ballast. Sometimes, we feel it's impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it's imaginary." In which a young woman delves deep into her ancestral history in search of a secretly......more