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    Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse: A Novel
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    Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse: A Novel
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    Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse: A Novel
    Ebook392 pages4 hours

    Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse: A Novel

    By Faith Sullivan

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

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    About this ebook

    Life could toss your sanity about like a glass ball; books were a cushion. How on Earth did non-readers cope when they had nowhere to turn?”

    Nell Stillman’s road is not easy. When her boorish husband dies soon after they move to the small town of Harvester, Minnesota, Nell is alone, penniless yet responsible for her beloved baby boy, Hillyard. Not an easy fate in small-town America at the beginning of the twentieth century.

    In the face of nearly insurmountable odds, Nell finds strength in lasting friendships and in the rich inner life awakened by the novels she loves. She falls in love with John Flynn, a charming congressman who becomes a father figure for Hillyard. She teaches at the local school and volunteers at the public library, where she meets Stella Wheeler and her charismatic daughter Sally. She becomes a friend and confidant to many of the girls in town, including Arlene and Lark Erhardt. And no matter how difficult her day, Nell ends each evening with a beloved book.

    The triumphant return of a great American storyteller, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse celebrates the strength and resourcefulness of independent women, the importance of community, and the transformative power of reading.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateSep 15, 2015
    ISBN9781571319173

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    Reviews for Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

    4/5

    2 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Despite the fairly predictable plot foreshadowed in main character Nell's Page 1 obituary (we all die! and nearly every other main character does too), the book moves smoothly and comfortably along, with many welcome intrigues.Nell's life evolves around the P.G. Wodehouse books she reads and is inspired by...until she learnsthat he and his wife may have been Nazi collaborators. Like the unknown writer of the nasty letters,this mystery remains unsolved. And there can be no sequel because, again, most everyone dies.This is too bad as it seems an easy way out: the remaining world though Hilly's eyes would have been one amazing story.
    • 4/5
      Want a gentle piece of humanistic escapism about a single mother who lives in a small Minnesota town that covers the first half of the 20th C.? This is it. Not humorous in the vein of Lake Wobegon but warm and neighborly like that fictional late 20th C. community. Nell copes with the shocks and stings she receives from the losses of family and friends by retreating into nightly readings of time-honored classics at first, but she eventually discovers a new author who writes about characters and a place so removed from her world that she wonders why she can possibly find stories about pomaded, flannel wearing, silly and foppish upper-crust young Brits. But she does and like Nell, we realize that the appeal of P.G. Wodehouse novels isn't the "who" are these particular people who populate garden parties, tennis matches, and London flats but the "universality" of human foibles, weaknesses, "fixes," and wit.For a first time novelist, Sullivan is polished and comfortable but not daring nor original. She's written a readable but not exceptional book that most who encounter it will find just the thing to occupy them on a long flight or while waiting for the kids to have their swimming lessons at the pool.
    • 4/5
      I may have found a new "comfort read" author. This novel is about reading for comfort, in a way. When Nell Stillman's abusive husband dies on the job, leaving her essentially destitute with an infant son, she is "rescued" by a member of the school board who offers her a job teaching third grade. Teaching becomes Nell's career, Laurence Lundeen and his family become her steadfast friends, and she "falls in love" with P. G. Wodehouse through borrowing his novels from Cora Lundeen. Whenever her life takes a difficult turn, she escapes into his latest collection of frivolous nonsense. There is so much more to this novel than might appear on the surface. It's a fairly straightforward narrative filled with the ups and downs of life in the early 20th century in a small town in Minnesota. They are not spared the grief of WWI, or the tragedies that arise from sheer human beastliness. As she ages, Nell Stillman becomes the woman some of her students turn to for advice and solace as they grow older and face life's challenges...the woman who will always listen, ply them with tea and cookies, and make no judgments whatsoever. As a fairly young child I dropped in on several elderly ladies who were sheer blessings in my life; they didn't stick around into my adulthood, but I'll never forget 'em. It was a delight to meet them all again in the person of Nell Stillman.