Tell Me Who We Were audiobook

No spoilers .... going in blind was how I did it ....and the way I recommend it. Enjoyable!!Audiobook...Narrated by: Sarah Naughton, Sophie Amoss, Allyson Ryan, Amy Landon, Gabra Zackman, Caitlin Davies, Hillary HuberI’ve said this before: I have a thing for stories at boarding schools ( perhaps because our own daughter attended ‘Interlochen’ for High School in Michigan- near Traverse City), years ago.Boarding schools breathe a life of their own....They also leave their students with a profound impact in the years to follow. Kate McQuade, author, grabs our attention immediately - with her first -[interconnected]-story. Six more stories follow. Each one more engaging than the next. Some quirky...others weepy...but all stories moved effortlessly and seamlessly through connected stages while emphasizing and strengthening old friendships or forging new one into womanhood. Six girls find Mr. Arcilla, their romance language teacher, ( at Briarfield, girls boarding school), dead naked - literally dead ‘and’ naked - at the bottom of Reed Pond. It becomes a defining moment for each of them:Lilith, Romy, Evie, Claire, Grace, and Nellie. The girls were in love with their teacher, and it became their first major loss. The heart of these stories is not just figuring out what happened to Mr. Arcilla - but more about each of the six girls themselves - (interwoven coming-of-age tales as more mature women).These are beautiful contemporary stories — powerful, touching, heartbreaking, and original.Kate McQuade conveys real emotion.....the kind that gives you pause....with clear-eyed prose. These stories undeviatingly examines the depths of love, loss, and hope. Each story has its own tale without focusing on how it would fit into the next… but they do… fit into the next. Our hearts are not lifted in every story-these are real people - women - with struggles and tragedies that feel as though they are outside of the girls control....The stories are short ( I’m being vague with the content purposely)... but each story is to be savored- one by one. A spell was cast over me —I’ll be thinking these women for a long time. Haunting, filled with insights into relationships— wonderful characterization, plot, and writing.

Mr. Arcilla, a language teacher at an all-girls boarding school, has drowned and it has sent his young students spinning. Lilith, Claire, Romy, Grace, Evie and Nellie struggle to find understanding of this loss as Mr. Arcilla was their first true love. They learn that Mr. Arcilla was nude when he was found and that leads them to believe he had been with his lover that evening and they try to work out who that would have been. This defining moment in their young lives will have an effect on them their entire lives.This is a series of interconnected short stories following the lives of these young girls. The stories are inspired by myths about women. This author is a fearless one and she has her finger on the pulse of what being a woman is all about. Although these women may have led different lives from mine, I recognized each of them in a deep way. She covers all areas of women’s lives – their young girlhoods, their loves, their marriages, their desire and fear of having children, their losses and even a bit of their afterlife.There is such beauty and magic in this book that I don’t even want to start another book for a few days. I just want this one to sit simmering in my heart for awhile.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.

"Mr. Arcilla died. . . Handsome and scruffy and achingly tall. . .He was just out of college. . . to teach twelve-year-old boarding school girls the fundamentals of Spanish and French. . . Spanish then French. . . He never made it to French. . ."Six twelve-year-old boarding school girls at the precipice of womanhood; all individually in love with their romance language teacher. Their budding pubescent lives firing up and things getting itchy in new places in their bodies. That time in their lives where they all felt daydreams foretold the future; where the difference between reality and imagination is blurred.Chapter One is a short story entitled, The Translator's Daughter, and is narrated by one of the girls as an older woman. She introduces Lilith, Romy, Evie, Claire, Nellie and Grace and reveals their interpersonal relationships, their individual backstories and their deep individual attraction to their twenty-five-year old teacher, Mr. ArcillaWhen his body is discovered floating naked in a nearby pond, the girls are devastated and disconcerted to find themselves alone to sort out the meaning of life and death and to discover that Mr. Arcilla, the kind and patient teacher, did not share their affections. He turned out to be just an ordinary man with individual troubles not unlike themselves. The scars from this event would affect each of them for the rest of their lives. The slender thread of Mr. Arcilla's death is the only thing that remains of their friendships after they leave the halls of Briarfield."Mr. Arcilla. Our first real love, our first real loss. We felt it keenly then, as if he had left each one of us. . .without a good-bye. . . Cast aside. Disregarded. Left on our own, alone."We will again meet Lilith, Romy, Evie, Claire, Nellie, and Grace, featured separately in the next six stories. Each story, a slice from each girls’ future, as inspired by the works of poets and translators famous for myths about women.The author has done a nice job of maintaining the magical realism revealed in The Translator's Daughter in each of the subsequent stories. To quote the publisher who summarizes it best:"Throughout these stories, these bright, imaginative, and ambitious girls mature into women, lose touch. . . achieve success and endure betrayal, marry and divorce, have children and struggle with infertility, abandon husbands and remain loyal to the end."I particularly liked that the book is a short story collection. I savored one each night this week as I wound down my day. Readers of The Night Circus, The Snow Child and Life of Pi will find it appealing.

{Thank you William Morrow for the finished copy of Tell Me Who We Were.}Trigger Warnings: Infertility, Miscarriage, Self Harm, Postpartum, Cancer, Suicide AttemptThe death of a beloved male teacher at a girl's boarding school sets in motion the lives of the girls who held him on a pedestal. In short stories, we follow their lives as adults.Tell Me Who We Were is beautifully written. It's poetic and lyrical and sometimes it went right over my head. Some of the passages are so stunning and striking that I stopped to re-read them; wanting to taste the words over and over. This book is heavy and deep, so the short story style works well for it. There is no other way to appreciate this book, than to read it in small doses. To better understand the author's style, I definitely recommend reading the acknowledgements. The author explains her inspiration for the stories, and it makes them easier to comprehend. This is a beautifully haunting book with a beautifully haunting cover. It is one that I am so happy to have on my shelf to visit again from time to time.

Well this is a great book with lots of insight and beautiful prose and yet it's just not for me. So I gave it four stars because I know it's well written. Seeing things exclusively from the standpoint of a younger person just isn't working for me at this point in my life. I need the adult perspective. So I got to the second story and the parents being seen from the eyes of their child after another child has left/disappeared and I'm missing the parent's perspective. Because I know they have it. Celeste Ng's book, Little Fires Everywhere, did that really well. You saw the young person's side but then she gave you the mom's side which was very different from what you would expect. It didn't excuse the adult behavior but it explained it. It gave me something I could use. So four stars because I'm sure it's a great book that I honestly couldn't get through.

Author Kate McQuade has written a series of short stories that center around a clique of girls, students who attend a school where a male teacher has been found dead. This teacher was unmarried, young and excitingly appealing to the students. To add to the excitement of his death, he is also found nude. This shared event impacts the girls and their individual lives comprise the subsequent stories. Honestly, each chapter is a world of its own: lush, lyrical, almost poetic. McQuade is amazingly talented. This is a fascinating collection of stories and the author is one to watch. I received my copy from the publisher through edelweiss.

Transcendent. Lyrical and haunting and quiet. A must read.

I really enjoyed this book and the separate stories, but it did get a little confusing.

Interesting and captivating

4.5*

A collection of short stories, loosely connected and beautifully written. Not light reading, but well worth the effort.

This collection delves into the lives of each of the girls from the first story, who grow up and become women. Each story felt like iterations of the same woman living different circumstances. They are echoes, facsimiles of each other, made all the more clear as Grace points out in “Ten Kinds of Salt” that she’s making her daughter Hannah, whose best friend Lana is referred to as her twin, in her own image. We return again and again to myths and fairy tales also to realize these are all the same women—Helen, the frog woman, Galatea, Daphne. This book writes about the experiences of white women in a way that is unflinchingly honest and engrossing.

I’m a short story collection sucker (as noted above) and McQuade’s tales are reminiscent of Karen Russell’s tangled combination of supernatural realism. She explores six girls from first semester at boarding school through to old age, with love, success, betrayal, marriage, infertility, divorce and loyalty. It’s a collection that keeps fanning out like a deck of cards as it touches on coming of age, female transformation and trauma inspired by women in Greek mythology.

Beautiful writing and haunting stories!