Book Summary and Reviews of The Gargoyle Hunters by John Freeman Gill

Book Summary

Hilarious and poignant, The Gargoyle Hunters is a love letter to a vanishing city, and a deeply emotional story of fathers and sons.

Intimately portraying New York's elbow-jostling relationship with time, the novel solves the mystery of a brazen and seemingly impossible architectural heist - the theft of an entire historic Manhattan building - that stunned the city and made the front page of The New York Times in 1974.

With both his family and his city fracturing, thirteen-year-old Griffin Watts is recruited into his estranged father's illicit and dangerous architectural salvage business. Small and nimble, Griffin is charged with stealing exuberantly expressive nineteenth-century architectural sculptures - gargoyles - right off the faces of unsung tenements and iconic skyscrapers all over town. As his father explains it, these gargoyles, carved and cast by immigrant artisans during the city's architectural glory days, are an endangered species in this era of sweeping urban renewal.

Desperate both to connect with his father and to raise cash to pay the mortgage on the brownstone where he lives with his mother and sister, Griffin is slow to recognize that his father's deepening obsession with preserving the architectural treasures of Beaux Arts New York is also a destructive force, imperiling Griffin's friendships, his relationship with his very first girlfriend, and even his life.

As his father grows increasingly possessive of both Griffin's mother and his scavenged touchstones of the lost city, Griffin must learn how to build himself into the person he wants to become and discover which parts of his life can be salvaged - and which parts must be let go. Maybe loss, he reflects, is the only thing no one can ever take away from you.

Tender, funny, and achingly sad, The Gargoyle Hunters introduces an extraordinary new novelist.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Discuss the significance of the epigraphs that open The Gargoyle Hunters. How do these quotes set the tone for the novel?
2. In the prologue, the narrator includes a quote from his sister, Quigley, summarizing her thoughts on the changing landscape of New York and explaining why she has decided to leave the city: "I'm tired of being homesick in my own hometown." How does this expression of grief for the city's shifts and changes echo throughout the novel? How does Griffin's sense of nostalgia for New York differ from Quigley's? From that of their parents'?
3. On page 8, Griffin's recollection of a party from his childhood concludes with "My father was no longer beside me." This line appears again on page 323, in the final ...