The Monsters of Templeton: A Novel (Paperback)
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Fall '08/Winter '09 Reading Group List
“Groff's engrossing first novel is wonderfully difficult to classify. Willie Upton returns to her ancestral home in Templeton (actually Cooperstown, NY) to recover from a personal crisis. She then decides to seek the identity of her father. This mystery unfolds through the tales of long-dead relatives and others from Willie's past, which is also Cooperstown's past. And then there's that dead sea-monster that's brought out of the lake....”
— Carol Dunn, Northwind Book & Fiber, Spooner, WI
Spring/Summer '09 Reading Group List
“Disgraced grad student Wilhelmina Cooper returns to her upstate New York hometown to lick her wounds. Her mother gives her new purpose: a research project to track down the father she's never known -- or maybe has. Voices from the town's past slowly reveal their stories, and we see Templeton has had more monsters than just the one in the town lake.”
— Rosemary Pugliese, Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh, NC
"Groff's multilayered saga both thrills and delights with poignant, breathtaking prose. A"—Entertainment Weekly
"At the heart of Lauren Groff's ambitious debut novel is a simple question. . . . But how that mystery is solved--through three centuries of one family's history overflowing with scandals and secrets--makes it a delightful and challenging novel. . . . The Monsters of Templeton makes readers work, but its rewards are worth it. Groff . . . is a talent to watch and celebrate."—USA Today
"The Monsters of Templeton, a fascinating first novel by Lauren Groff, is a book with joy in its marrow--fabulous."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Part mystery and part history. . . . Groff turns her story into a meditation on the nature of change and how evolution--of a place, a family, a person--even if it's diffcult and unsettling, can bring joyous rewards."—Miami Herald
"Absorbing."—People
"Monsters will give you paper cuts from turning pages."—Marie Claire
"Fabulously inventive . . . follows the trend of recent books such as March, Finn, and Ahab's Wife of extracting characters from classic novels, adding two cups of history, a quart of imagination, and stirring vigorously."—The Christian Science Monitor
"Groff's lyrical debut . . . brilliantly incorporates accounts from generations of Templetonians--as well as characters "borrowed" from the works of James Fenimore Cooper. Groff paints a rich picture . . . readers will delight in Willie's sharp wit and Groff's creation of an entire world, complete with a lake monster and illegitimate children."—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"In The Monsters of Templeton, Lauren Groff has crafted a multi-layered story that is boldly inventive and surprising, by turns wistful, elegiac, and sweeping."—Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light
"Lauren Groff's debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, is everything a reader might have expected from this gifted writer, and more. Willie is a funny, sexy, plucky heroine; her Mom--a once-upon-a-time hippie who's gone Baptist but not square--is a hoot; her family history is a funhouse through which Willie must wander in order to find her father. Best of all is Templeton, a town that will remind readers of Ray Bradbury at his most magical. There are monsters, murders, bastards, and ne'er-do-wells almost without number. I was sorry to see this rich and wonderful novel come to an end, and there is no higher success than that."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly
"Lauren Groff hits a home run in her first at-bat, with a novel that is intriguingly constructed and compulsively readable."—Denver Post