The Humanity Project

April 1, 2013
Thompson's thoughtful new novel ponders the sins we commit in the name of love and our capacity for compassion. The "detached" life of San Francisco bay area nurse Christie, divorced and in her thirties, is thrown into motion when Mrs. Foster, a wealthy patient, asks her to lead her charity, whose aim is to "benefit humanity" by paying "people to be good." Christie's neighbor, Art, already struggling with adulthood, takes in his troubled teenage daughter, Linnea, after she survives a school shooting in the Midwest. Though her move to California is not the quick fix Linnea's mother had hoped for, Linnea does connect with Conner, a teenage boy from another broken, troubled home, calling their bond an "accidental, lost-in-space collision" and the two of them "a pair of separately damaged goods." The disappearance of Conner's father finally brings these disparate characters together. Thompson (The Year We Left Home) asks what can we actually do to change the lives of others, and investigates the value of good intentions, finding answers in the emotional lives of richly-drawn characters who do what they mustâand what they think they mustâin order to help the ones they love. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner.

Starred review from February 15, 2013
Seemingly everybody on the class ladder scrabbles for a definition of human decency in the latest from Thompson (The Year We Left Home, 2011, etc.). The novel opens with a penetrating vision of a lower-middle-class family sinking fast. Sean is a divorced, out-of-work handyman who's about to lose his Bay Area house and his grip on his teenage son, Conner; when Sean decides to meet a woman via Craigslist, the attempted one-night stand only leaves his body broken in a highway wreck. The bad news doesn't stop there: Nearby, divorcee Art is forced to take in his teenage daughter, who's become a disciplinary nightmare back in Ohio after witnessing her half sister's murder in a school shooting. After a stint of petty thievery, Conner does odd jobs for a wealthy widow, Mrs. Foster, who wants to do something with her late husband's largesse. So, she taps her nurse, Christie (also Art's neighbor), to run a nonprofit with a vague purpose and name: The Humanity Project. The worlds-in-collision setup is contrived, but Thompson's handling of it is superb and unforced. She wants to explore how much of our bad behavior, from lousy dates to murder, is hard-wired, and in Sean and Conner, she exposes how much our actions are grim functions of economic circumstance. Yet this book isn't preachy, and Thompson has a knack for rendering characters who are emotionally fluid but of a piece: A daughter of Mrs. Foster's who's outraged at her squandered inheritance is selfish, yes, but her despair about a nonprofit's ability to repair humanity is legitimate. Thompson caps the story with a smart twist ending that undoes many of the certainties the reader arrived at in the preceding pages. A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives.

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November 15, 2012

A National Book Award finalist for City Boy, Thompson continues to deliver category-defying work. Having survived a high school shootout, Linnea has been sent to live with her estranged father, whose neighbor Christie, a nurse, is charged with tending a charity organization funded by a dotty patient. Literary/commercial appeal.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2013
Thompson (The Year We Left Home, 2011) achieves exceptional clarity and force in this instantly addictive, tectonically shifting novel. As always, her affection and compassion for her characters draw you in close, as does her imaginative crafting of precarious situations and moments of sheer astonishment. The plot revolves around two southern California single fathers and their teenage offspring. Sean is struggling to find construction work as his house goes into foreclosure. His son, Conner, should be looking forward to college, but, instead, he, too, is scrambling for a job. Art, a pot-smoking, part-time college teacher smitten with his neighbor, Christie, a worldly-wise nurse and the moral fulcrum of the novel, has played no role in his now 15-year-old daughter's life. So both he and Linnea have a lot to navigate when she moves in after surviving a school shooting in Ohio. All lives converge and are transformed when a wealthy widow establishes a hazily conceived philanthropic organization. Thompson infuses her characters' bizarre, terrifying, and instructive misadventures with hilarity and profundity as she considers the wild versus the civilized, the survival of the richest, how and why we help and fail each other, and what it might mean to build an authentic spiritual self. Thompson is at her tender and scathing best in this tale of yearning, paradox, and hope. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Thompson attracts more readers with each book; a strong publicity push and critical acclaim should carry The Humanity Project to the top.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)