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An American Tune (Break Away Books) Paperback – September 19, 2016
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While reluctantly accompanying her husband and daughter to freshman orientation at Indiana University, Nora Quillen hears someone call her name, a name she has not heard in more than 25 years. Not even her husband knows that back in the '60s she was Jane Barth, a student deeply involved in the antiwar movement. An American Tune moves back and forth in time, telling the story of Jane, a girl from a working-class family who fled town after she was complicit in a deadly bombing, and Nora, the woman she became, a wife and mother living a quiet life in northern Michigan. An achingly poignant account of a family crushed under the weight of suppressed truths, now available as a Break Away Book Club Edition, An American Tune illuminates the irrevocability of our choices and how those choices come to compose the tune of our lives.
- Print length328 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBreak Away Book Club Edition
- Publication dateSeptember 19, 2016
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.5 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100253022878
- ISBN-13978-0253022875
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Shoup vividly captures the excitement of a teenager's first few months on a college campus and also evokes the currents of counterculture eddying and surging through Indiana University in the mid-to late 1960s."―Bloom Magazine
"Shoup's novel is most compelling in its historical portrayal of university life in the turbulent 1960s . . ."―Library Journal
"Fans of Jeffrey Eugenides or Tatiana de Rosnay will appreciate her ability to capture the spirit of a time and place while asking serious social questions. However politically minded, though, this poignant and stirring novel is at its root a moving and passionate love story."―Booklist
"Some writers have a gift for creating cozy scenes and comfortable locales despite a larger context of unease and violence. In her new novel An American Tune, Barbara Shoup accomplishes this. . ."―Foreword Reviews
"[Shoup] is a wonderful writer with an amazing story to tell to those of us who have been fumbling along trying to gain perspective on a signal moment in our own history. Hers is the first account, in my opinion, that understands the combination of the extraordinary and the banal that characterized the antiwar movement, and yet she's never didactic. The extraordinary and the banal coexist in the seminal moments of any generation, of course, but to those of us who became adults during the Vietnam War years it is still surprising to remember over and over again how self-absorbed, how trivial we were while also making profound decisions."―Robb Forman Dew, author of the novels Dale Loves Sophie to Death
"Barbara Shoup's An American Tune is an elegant, moving, finely written page-turner that reaffirms and makes fresh again Faulkner's assertion that the past is never dead; it's not even past."―Will Allison, author of Long Drive Home
"The story of Jane and Nora―and what happens when these two lives converge―held me in great suspense. This highly readable novel isn't afraid to talk liberal politics during wartime, nor is it afraid to tell an epic love story. I loved everything about Barb Shoup's An American Tune."―Cathy Day, author of The Circus in Winter
"Barbara Shoup has written a rich and timely story about one generation's outrage and the long reverberations of secrets. Her plot has much to say about the tangle of responsibility and how an ill-advised war disrupts an intricate network of ordinary American lives. A striking and memorable novel warm, sage, and beautifully written."―Joan Silber, novelist and National Book Award finalist for Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
"An American Tune is about the '60s but it's about now, too. It's about a mother finding herself in her daughter, for better and for worse, and it's about generations of women forever realizing that even though we try our best to prevent them, our children were born to make their own mistakes. Nora will become your honest-to-God best friend because she reminds us of where we've been, what we're doing, and what we are looking for."―Margaret McMullan, editor of Every Father's Daughter: Twenty-four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers
"An American Tune kept me on the edge of my seat while at the same time wanting to savor the evocative, memorable and true sentences along with way. Barbara Shoup's exasperating yet loveable characters felt so real that I longed to lure them into my kitchen for a cup of coffee so I could spend more time with them. Shoup brings the Sixties back to life with wry humor and sympathy, reminding us all the while that we have never left its shadow. A haunting, powerful book. I loved it."―Elizabeth Stuckey-French, author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady
"It's an ordinary day until a man calls your name, a man from the life you've tried your best to leave behind. Suddenly, anything can happen. Such is the case in Barbara Shoup's engaging new novel, An American Tune. A story that comes from the heartland and from the heart. I cared about these characters as if they were my own family members. What a moving story of what it is to long for the person you once were, set against the backdrop of political unrest both then and now."―Lee Martin, author of The Bright Forever
Review
It's an ordinary day until a man calls your name, a man from the life you've tried your best to leave behind. Suddenly, anything can happen. Such is the case in Barbara Shoup's engaging new novel, An American Tune. A story that comes from the heartland and from the heart. I cared about these characters as if they were my own family members. What a moving story of what it is to long for the person you once were, set against the backdrop of political unrest both then and now.
-- Lee MartinAbout the Author
Barbara Shoup is author of eight novels and co-author of two books about the creative process. Her short fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in The Writer and in the New York Times travel section, and her young adult novels, Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony, were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Shoup is executive director of the Indiana Writers Center and in 2012 was the regional winner of the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award.
Product details
- Publisher : Break Away Book Club Edition (September 19, 2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 328 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0253022878
- ISBN-13 : 978-0253022875
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.5 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,659,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #8,116 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #42,691 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Barbara Shoup is an award winning, multi-genre author who served for many years as Executive Director of the Indiana Writers Center and has taught the craft of writing for over 40 years. She has penned eight novels and co-authored Novel Ideas, a highly acclaimed, definitive guide for aspiring novelists on how to write great fiction. Her newest book for writers, A Commotion in Your Heart, is part memoir of the craft and part instructions on writing and life.
Barbara’s young adult novels Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony were selected as the American Library Association’s Best Books for Young Adults. Her novel Vermeer’s Daughter was a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults. She was also the recipient of the 2006 PEN Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Working Writer Fellowship. She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Visit her website at www.barbarashoup.com
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By the way, over this, runs a soundtrack -- the chapter titles are song titles from the 60s and early 70s. (I encourage you to listen to the music.)
For me, this story was personal. College was a place of discovery for me, as it was for Jane. I, too, often felt that I had finally found my people. And, like Nora, I'm dropping off my only child at college (and in fact, at Indiana University - Bloomington, the college in the story) within the next week. He is going to a place rich with memories for me, as it was for Nora, although I think I've left behind fewer secrets.
We were privileged to have Barbara Shoup attend our book club meeting. She talked about her process, the years of research that led to this book, and the events that inspired it. That certainly added to my enjoyment of the book, but even without that, this has been one of my favorite reads this year.
I was in college during the Vietnam War, and the portrayal of the times is accurate. More importantly for this review, the references to the war and the characters’ reactions are an integral part of the plot. By contrast, the references to Iran feel as if they were forced in to make a political point. While most fiction has a message, the best fiction weaves it in seamlessly so that the reader barely notices it as he or she gets caught up in the plot. That wasn’t the case here. A few references to Iran may have been necessary to show us Nora/Jane’s motivation, but at some point it turned into a lecture.
An American Tune deserves three stars because the story is interesting when it isn’t lecturing. But I can’t give it a higher rating because there were too many times when the book was easy to put down.
I question the hero. Women's liberation didn't come out of men behaving as he supposedly does. I doubt that any man at that time could have behaved as the book describes. Yes, there are loyal, loving men, but without this hero, the entire plot of the book falls to pieces. I miss any hint of the racism and sexism that were being fought about at the same time, part and parcel, with the anti-war movement. A minor argument: I feel certain the FBI would not have left all of the heroine's memorabilia plus the bank account behind for her to pick up thirty years later. And at that later time, would our hero and heroine not have had to deal with the law at all? I wonder.
Still I loved the book and wish to thank the author for writing it.