Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2022
330 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Paperback Original.
Publication Information
Set during the Ronald Reagan presidency, this lyrical novel transcends an adventure story to take the reader on an unforgettable journey.
What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me explores the story of Lee, a vibrant thirteen-year-old boy who is facing premature death from Progeria (a premature aging disease); his caretaker Tomás, a survivor of Argentina's Dirty War, who is searching for his missing wife, who was pregnant when they were both "disappeared;" and Lee's single mother, Cass, overwhelmed by love for her son and the demands of her work as a Broadway makeup artist. When a mix-up prevents Cass from taking Lee on his "final wish" trip to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia to pursue his interest in the life of Ben Franklin, Tomás—who has discovered potential leads to his family in both cities—offers to accompany Lee on the trip.
As one flees memories of death and the other hurtles inevitably toward it, they each share unsettling truths and find themselves transformed in the process.
"The relationship between Lee and Tomás, who's faced horrors of his own, is
rich and nuanced. Gordon's achieved the rare thing, a stirring, poignant story of death
and love and a page-turning adventure." - The Boston Globe
"Behind this wonderfully evocative prose is a deeply compassionate writer who has created here an unforgettable main character - Lee, an ill-fated boy whose strength and humor and soul-deep resilience I will not soon forget."—Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long and House of Sand and Fog
"This largehearted, beautifully written novel takes us on an unforgettable quest with an unforgettable character. Lee, the charming, vibrant, dying child at the novel's core, reminds us that the true source of light is in the people around us and that each moment offers us the choice of how best to spend our precious hours on this earth. Compassionate, funny, and deeply moving, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is full to the brim with intelligence and love." —Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds and Night at the Fiestas
"This story belongs to Lee, a child whose questioning mind and uncanny eloquence will teach you how to die and how to live, and ultimately how to survive beyond the final pages of Donna Gordon's astonishing novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me." —Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications
"What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is a fascinating, heartrending novel that will challenge what you thought you knew about the human condition." —Rachel Weaver, author of Point of Direction
This information about What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Donna Gordon graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a PEN Discovery, and a Ploughshares Discovery. She received the New Letters Publication Prize in fiction, and her writing has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Story Quarterly, Post Road, The Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, the Boston Globe Magazine, Solstice, and others. Her work with former political prisoners culminated in "Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience." What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is her first novel. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband and two sons.
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