Since I began reading the books, a lot has changed in my life. He has closed the system from the invasive threat of change, and the world will never see Norman’s transgressive paintings. Not only has Massey been killing Norman over decades he has been receiving and destroying Norman’s finished work, too. He has spent decades sending blank canvases laced with asbestos to his former colleague, who receives them as kindness.

It wasn’t enough for Massey to drum Norman out of his conformist art school department for being a square peg in a painterly round hole. Massey seems to have both the most and the least to lose, and the twist surprised me, at least. Like Peter, Massey values surfaces: unchallenging, technically proficient art as well as the aesthetics of his school. In the end, we find out it’s the elderly art professor Massey who has schemed to kill Norman. Gamache lets Clara lead him, which dovetails into both of their overarching stories: Gamache’s acceptance of the emotional baggage he carries and Clara’s self actualization. Together, they investigate where he’s been and where he might be going next. After a couple of weeks, she tells Gamache she believes he’s missing. She has prepared a typically sumptuous Three Pines dinner, but he never appears. The town’s artist, Clara, has been expecting her wayward and calculating husband Peter back after a year’s emotional rumspringa. In The Long Way Home, we rejoin the action in Three Pines on a fateful day. For proof, look at #10, The Long Way Home. She also has a gift, a knack, for casting the right mystery alongside the right theme that affects Gamache or his loved ones. I’d argue that Penny positions Gamache’s investigations in a much more organic way, as part of his daily life and of a career he openly grapples with during the books. They do also go into a great deal of detail about the lives of Gamache, his family, and the people in the village of Three Pines where he later lives. He’s so upright that taking down his own department in a hail of bullets only clears a path for him to come back in an even more powerful job eventually. But within that framework, or perhaps as fruit of the poisoned tree, Gamache is kind, intelligent, dogged, and almost unbelievably moral. Gamache is a cop, yes the books are undeniably copaganda, like most detective series. After his uncle's death, Ishmael flees Sierra Leone for neighboring Guinea and eventually makes his way to his new life in the United States.What grabbed me about Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache books right away is their thoughtfulness. He meets Laura Simms, a storyteller and his future foster mom, and sees the importance of sharing his experience with the world in hopes of preventing such horrors from happening to other children.Īfter Ishmael returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, a coup by the RUF and the military ousts the civilian government, and the war Ishmael has been avoiding catches up with him. He learns that others like him have suffered and survived. Ishmael is invited along with other children of war to New York City to tell his story to the United Nations.

Ishmael is welcomed by his extended family in Freetown and is again saved by their support and kindness. The love and compassion he finds at the center from a nurse named Esther opens up an understanding and forgiveness within himself. Ishmael is taken to a rehabilitation center, where he struggles to understand his past and to imagine a future. Ishmael continues to soldier fiercely until his Lieutenant turns the boy soldiers over to UNICEF. The boy soldiers become addicted to cocaine, marijuana, and 'brown brown,' which give them the courage to fight and the ability to repress their emotions in times of war. The army becomes his family and he is brainwashed into believing that each rebel death may avenge his own family's slaughter. Their day-to-day existence is a struggle of survival, and the boys find themselves committing acts they would never have believed themselves capable of, such as stealing food from children.Įventually, Ishmael is conscripted as a soldier by the army and he becomes the very thing he feared: a killing machine capable of horrible violence. Among the confusion, violence, and uncertainty of the war, Ishmael, his brother, and his friends wander from village to village in search of food and shelter. When he is twelve years old, Beah's village is attacked while he is away performing in a rap group with friends. A Long Way Gone is the true story of Ishmael Beah, who becomes an unwilling boy soldier during a civil war in Sierra Leone.

A long way home discussion questions