[I couldn’t help but be reminded of events at writing conferences where aspiring authors line up to meet agents. The agents sit at tables. The candidates line up. The bell rings. I digress.]

Cooper tells the stories of eight single adults. They come looking for …well…sexual encounters, and perhaps a relationship.

Among the speed daters are:

Harriet, a freelance writer looking for a story. Harriet’s unresolved issues include an eight-year relationship that has lost its juice, continued mourning for a cat named Pushkin, a frustration that she has yet to write her first novel. [I can relate to the last one.]

Laure is a lawyer masquerading as a hairdresser. She once shared a cat called Dainty with a man called Sanjay. She wanted children. He didn’t. He kept the cat.

Sanjay’s longest relationship is with the above cat. He wasn’t expecting to meet Laure at the Jacaranda – didn’t even know she was in town.

Cooper alternates voices as each person’s story unfolds intermingled with the lives of the others. Each discovers sexual encounters, no matter how satisfying, don’t fill the void within. Yet the act of exposing themselves to others ignites a new self-awareness that infuses their lives.

Acknowledgments:
Featured Image: Jacaranda Flowers by Tatiana Gerus. Creative Commons Attribution. Wikimedia Commons

Carol Cooper. One Night at the Jacaranda. 2013. Available in a Kindle or Create Space edition at Amazon.com

One Night at the Jacaranda is Dr. Carol Cooper’s debut novel. To find out more about Carol Cooper and her medical expertise, go to her website. Carol Cooper

Kate Mirkin. “Why you should try Speed Dating.” Huffington Post. April 6, 2013. Here.

The post A Story About Speed Daters first appeared on Sandra Wagner-Wright.

The bird stands on his feed box and looks at the viewer with confidence. It appears he could fly away until the viewer takes a closer look. A tiny chain attaches the bird’s ankle to the box. The bird appears free, but isn’t.

In this, Febritius’ Goldfinch is much like the protagonist in Donna Tartt’s Pulizer Prize winning book, The Goldfinch. Tarttt uses painting as a means to anchor young Theo, giving him a final tie to his dead mother. ThereTartt employs two other themes — references to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and a story more than one critic compares to Dicken’s Oliver Twist.

Less overt is the finch as a Christian symbol. Because it eats thistle seeds, the bird is said to represent Christ’s Passion, particularly the Crown of Thorns. It appears in many Christian paintings as a sub-text [Can paintings have a sub-text?] for endurance and persistence. Certainly, Theo represents these traits by the very fact that he is still alive on the last page.

The book is about a boy from the age of thirteen until perhaps the age of thirty. Theo Decker is an imperfect child who idolizes his mother. He’s also suspended from school. The novel opens with mother and son on their way to meet the school principal, but they have a little extra time and duck into the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art to view The Goldfinch. A sudden terrorist explosion propells Theo into more worlds that any one person could be expected to survive.

Unable to find his mother, Theo befriends a dying man who urges him to take The Goldfinch away with him in order to protect the painting. Theo complies, always intending to return the painting, but never quite able to do so. Now motherless and suffering from intense grief, survivor guilt and PTSD, Theo joins the Barbour family because he knew their son at school. Theo makes friends with Hobie, an antique furniture restorer and meets Pippa, who was also in the museum during the explosion. Pippa suffers  more serious physical injuries than Theo, and becomes the object of the boy’s  unrequited love. And this is just in the first few chapters.

Unexpectedly Theo’s father, who left the family some time before, appears and whisks the boy off to Vegas. That’s a story in itself. It’s in Vegas that Theo meets the most charming ne’er do well in the book, a seriously disturbed boy named Boris.

Boris is worldly wise with a heart of gold. Together the boys experiance life in an  alcoholic and drug induced haze. It’s like Peter Pan gone wrong – all boys and no functional parents.

Improbably, Tartt’s book won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The citation calls The Goldfinch

“a beautifully written coming-of-age novel with exquisitely drawn characters … a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.”

Stephen King called The Goldfinch “a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade.”

Despite the praise, many literary critics expressed dismay that Tartt’s book achieved so many accolades and sales. When adults enjoy reading Harry Potter books, they sniffed, the literary bar falls. The London Sunday Times called Goldfinch a fairy tale for adults. Indeed. Except fairy tales are generally shorter.

To be honest,  I skimmed a substantial number of pages, yet I kept reading. Tartt is a compelling writer, and I was hooked on the question of whether Theo would actually make it into adulthood and self-respect. It seems that he did … or did he?

The Goldfinch is available as a Kindle edition. Take a chance. Read it and see what you think.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Available at Amazon.com

Acknowledgements:
Featured Image: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius. 1654. Original at the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis. The Hague, Netherlands. US Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons.

2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Citation. http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2014-Fiction

Natalie Hayes. “Why Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch might be the Best-Seller that Nobody can Finish.” The Guardian. Dec. 10, 2014.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/10/donna-tart-shamed-by-e-reader-the-goldfinch

Evgenia Perez. “It’s Tartt, but is it Art?” Vanity Fair. July 2014.
www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/…/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-critics

The post A Bird, A Boy, & A Painting: Donna Tartt’s Goldfinch first appeared on Sandra Wagner-Wright.