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The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel Kindle Edition

by Hannah Tinti (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 2,793 ratings

Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A gripping American-on-the-run thriller . . . a brilliant coming-of-age tale and a touching exploration of father-daughter relationships.”—Newsweek

“One part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation.”—Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth

NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST NOVELS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Washington Post • Paste

Samuel Hawley isn’t like the other fathers in Olympus, Massachusetts. A loner who spent years living on the run, he raised his beloved daughter, Loo, on the road, moving from motel to motel, always watching his back. Now that Loo’s a teenager, Hawley wants only to give her a normal life. In his late wife’s hometown, he finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at the local high school.

Growing more and more curious about the mother she never knew, Loo begins to investigate. Soon, everywhere she turns, she encounters the mysteries of her parents’ lives before she was born. This hidden past is made all the more real by the twelve scars her father carries on his body. Each scar is from a bullet Hawley took over the course of his criminal career. Each is a memory: of another place on the map, another thrilling close call, another moment of love lost and found. As Loo uncovers a history that’s darker than she could have known, the demons of her father’s past spill over into the present—and together both Hawley and Loo must face a reckoning yet to come.

Praise for The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

“A master class in literary suspense.”—The Washington Post

“Tinti depicts brutality and compassion with exquisite sensitivity, creating a powerful overlay of love and pain.”—The New Yorker

“Hannah Tinti’s beautifully constructed second novel . . . uses the scars on Hawley’s body—all twelve bullet wounds, one by one—to show who he is, what he’s done, and why the past chases and clings to him with such tenacity.”—The Boston Globe

“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is an adventure epic with the deeper resonance of myth. . . . Tinti exhibits an aptitude for shining a piercing light into the corners of her characters’ hearts and minds.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of April 2017: “When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun.” So begins Hannah Tinti’s masterful, absorbing novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Hawley has been on the run for decades. He’s had various side-kicks – his con-man partner Jove, the love of his life, Lily – but for the past decade and a half, it’s been his daughter, Loo. When she turns twelve, Hawley buys a house in Olympus, Massachusetts, the hometown of his deceased wife, and settles down for good. But his penchant for violence and his dark past make settling in far from easy. Loo, too, has picked up the ways of her father – but she doesn’t know the half of it. The novel deftly alternates between present day Massachusetts and Hawley’s younger years to tell the story of the twelve bullets that have scarred his body. Tinti’s gritty, deeply flawed characters are rendered with such empathy that it’s impossible not to root for them. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is full of action, heart and men and women living on the edge of society. --Al Woodworth, The Amazon Book Review

From School Library Journal

With her first novel since her Alex Award—winning The Good Thief, Tinti has produced another excellent, teen-friendly narrative, a blend of thriller and coming-of-age that's full of fascinating characters. Samuel has led a dangerous life, which began with petty crime as an adolescent and became more difficult as he grew older. He bears the scars of 12 bullets, and the story behind each injury is revealed in exciting flashbacks. Samuel and his daughter, Loo, move often to avoid enemies who are looking for him. When Loo is ready for high school, Samuel feels safe enough to settle in Loo's mother's Massachusetts hometown, where he becomes a fisherman. At school, Loo is bullied until she attacks her tormentors, and a romance with a bright classmate eases her loneliness and lightens the tense plot. She is a clever, courageous teen who surprises her father when his past catches up with him. The pace of the novel is incredibly fast, and the characters are well developed. VERDICT Tinti's deft combination of gripping action and deep characterization will attract high school readers, especially those with a literary bent.—Karlan Sick, formerly at New York Public Library

Review

“Can a man be both a violent criminal and a good father? Imagine a Quentin Tarantino movie crossed with a John Green novel, and you’ll have a sense of what this coming-of-age novel is like.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Tinti depicts brutality and compassion with exquisite sensitivity, creating a powerful overlay of love and pain.” —The New Yorker

“The book [has] an irresistible velocity that Ms. Tinti sustains to the end.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Tinti has established herself as one of our great storytellers. She draws you in with this book, and it’s really difficult to get away.”—Rolling Stone

“A shoot-em-up, a love story and a mystery, this is one heartwarming feast of a book.”—People

“The term ‘literary thriller’ is almost an oxymoron. It’s the writerly equivalent of threading a needle while riding on a rollercoaster, requiring attention to character and fine prose while hurtling from one near-disaster to another. Only a few writers can pull it off, and Hannah Tinti is one of them. . . . The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is a gripping father-daughter road trip where the bad guys are never far behind. . . . Tarantino-like in its plot twists, action, and violence, the novel sweeps across the country and back and forth in time. Its structure feels as meticulously crafted as a matchstick Taj Mahal.”—Interview

“Tinti makes each of her crime scenes wildly different yet equally suspenseful. As skillful as she is, she never romanticizes her bad actors. What most deeply interests her is the stumbling, fumbling humanity that results in bad actions. . . . She fuses urgent, vibrant storytelling with a keen understanding of broken people desperate to be whole.”—Newsday

“Even before the official release of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley in March, early readers deemed it worthy of excitement. . . . At once a coming-of-age adventure, a love story and a literary thriller.”—Time

“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is a miraculous accomplishment in genre-bending: Not only a gripping American-on-the-run thriller, it’s also a brilliant coming-of-age tale and a touching exploration of father-daughter relationships. Regardless of what your reading tastes are, there’s something here for absolutely everyone.”—Newsweek

“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is an adventure epic with the deeper resonance of myth. . . . Tinti exhibits an aptitude for shining a piercing light into the corners of her characters’ hearts and minds. Her ability to lay bare their passions, portraying their vulnerabilities and violent urges with equal insight, leaves the reader at once shaken and moved.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is one part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation. Hannah Tinti proves herself to be an old-fashioned storyteller of the highest order.”—Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth

About the Author

Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. Her short story collection Animal Crackers was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her bestselling novel The Good Thief won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an American Library Association Alex Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Tinti is the co-founder and executive editor of the award-winning literary magazine One Story.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hawley

When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun. He had a case full of them in his room, others hidden in boxes around the house. Loo had seen them at night, when he took the guns apart and cleaned them at the kitchen table, oiling and polishing and brushing for hours. She was forbidden to touch them and so she watched from a distance, learning what she could about their secrets, until the day when she blew out birthday candles on twelve chocolate Ring Dings, arranged on a plate in the shape of a star, and Hawley opened the wooden chest in their living room and put the gift she had been waiting for—her grandfather’s rifle—into her arms.

Now Loo waited in the hallway as her father pulled down a box of ammunition from the front closet. He took out some .22 rimfires—long-rifle and Magnum—as well as nine-millimeter Hornady 115-grain. The bullets rattled inside their cardboard containers as he slid them into a bag. Loo took note of every detail, as if her father’s choices were part of a test she would later have to pass. Hawley grabbed a bolt-action Model 5 Remington, a Winchester Model 52 and his Colt Python.

Whenever he left the house, Loo’s father carried a gun with him. Each of these guns had a story. There was the rifle that Loo’s grandfather had carried in the war, notched with kills, that now belonged to her. There was the twenty-gauge shotgun from a ranch in Wyoming where Hawley worked for a time running horses. There was a set of silver dueling pistols in a polished wooden case, won in a poker game in Arizona. The snub-nosed Ruger he kept in a bag at the back of his closet. The collection of derringers with pearl handles that he hid in the bottom drawer of his bureau. And the Colt with a stamp from Hartford, Connecticut, on the side.

The Colt had no particular resting place. Loo had found it underneath her father’s mattress and sitting openly on the kitchen table, on top of the refrigerator and once on the edge of the bathtub. The gun was her father’s shadow. Resting in the places he had passed through. If Hawley was out of the room, sometimes she would touch the handle. The grip was made of rosewood, and felt smooth beneath her fingers, but she never picked it up or moved it from whatever place he had set it down.

Hawley grabbed the Colt now and tucked it under his belt, then strung the rifles across his shoulder. He said, “Come on, troublemaker.” Then he held open the door for them both. He led his daughter into the woods behind their house and down into the ravine, where a stream rushed over mossy rocks before emptying out into the ocean.

It was a clear day. The leaves had abandoned their branches for the forest floor, a carpet of crimson, yellow and orange; crisp and rustling. Loo’s father marked a pine tree at two hundred yards with a small spot of white paint, then set the bucket down and walked back to his daughter and the guns.

Hawley was in his forties but looked younger, his hips still narrow, his legs strong. He was as tall as a longboat, with wide shoulders that sloped from the years of driving his truck back and forth across the country with Loo in the passenger seat. His hands were callused from the day jobs he’d work from time to time—fixing cars or painting houses. His fingernails were lined with grease and his dark hair was always overgrown and tangled. But his eyes were a deep blue and he had a face that was rough and broken in a way that came out handsome. Wherever they had stopped on the road, whether it was for breakfast at some diner on the highway, or in a small town where they’d set up for a while, Loo would notice women drifting toward him. But her father would make his mouth go still and set his jaw and it kept anyone from getting too close.

These days his truck wasn’t going anywhere except down to the water, where they dug clams and hauled buckets of shells. Quahogs, Hawley called them. But also littlenecks, topnecks, steamers and cherrystones, depending on their size and color. He used a rake to hunt but Loo preferred a long, thin spade that could pierce the surface before the creatures began to burrow. Early each morning father and daughter rolled their pants above their knees and slipped on rubber boots. The shells were pulled from the salt marshes and mudflats, from the sandy bay and at low tide along the shore.

Hawley took the Remington off his shoulder and showed Loo how to load the clip. Five bullets slid inside, one by one. Then the magazine clicked into place.

“This is for starters. A practice gun. It won’t do much damage. But still,” he said. “Keep the safety on. Check your target and what’s behind your target. Don’t point it at anything you don’t want to shoot.”

He opened the bolt, retracted, then closed it again, pulling the first live round into the chamber. Then he handed his daughter the rifle. “Plant your feet,” he said. “Loosen your knees. Take a breath. Let half of it out. That’s when you want to squeeze the trigger. On the exhale. Don’t pull—just squeeze.”

The Remington was cool and heavy in Loo’s hands, and her arms shook a little as she raised the stock to her shoulder. She had dreamed of holding one of her father’s guns for so many years that it was as if she were dreaming now. She tried to level the sight as she took aim, pulled the handle in close, lifted her elbow and last, last of all, flipped off the safety.

“What are you going to shoot?” her father asked.

“That tree,” said Loo.

“Right.”

In her mind she imagined the trajectory of the bullet, saw it going for miles, creating its own history. She knew every part of this gun, every gear and bolt, and she could sense each piece now—the spring and the carrier and the chamber and the pin—working together and sliding into place as she touched the trigger.

The explosion that followed was more of a pop than a blast. The butt of the rifle barely moved against her shoulder. She expected a thrill, some kind of corresponding shudder in her body, but all she felt was a tiny bubble of relief.

“Look,” her father said.

Loo lowered the barrel. She could just make out the white mark in the distance, untouched. “I missed.”

“Everyone misses.” Hawley scratched his nose. “Your mother missed.”

“She did?”

“The first time,” he said. “Now slide the bolt.”

“Did she use this gun?”

“No,” said Hawley. “She liked the Ruger.”

Loo pulled back on the lever and the casing flung through the air and onto the forest floor. She locked the bolt back into place, and the next bullet slid into the chamber. Her mother, Lily, had died before the girl could remember. A drowning accident in a lake. Hawley had shown Loo the exact spot where it had happened, on a map of Wisconsin. A small blue circle she could hide with the tip of her finger.

Hawley did not like to speak about it. Because of this the air shimmered a bit whenever he did, as if Lily’s name were conjuring something dangerous. Most of what Loo knew about her mother was contained in a box full of mementos, a traveling shrine that her father re-created in the bathroom of each place they lived. Motel rooms and temporary apartments, walk-ups and cabins in the woods, and now this house on the hill, this place that Hawley said would be their home.

The photographs went up first, around the bathtub and sink. Her father affixed each carefully so they wouldn’t rip—shots of Loo’s mother and her long black hair, pale skin and green eyes. Next he arranged half-used bottles of shampoo and conditioner, a compact and a tube of red lipstick, a bent toothbrush, a silk bathrobe with dragons sewn on the back and cans of Lily’s favorite foods—pineapple and garbanzo beans—along with bits of handwriting, scraps of paper discovered after her death, things she had needed from the grocery store, lists of activities she had hoped to finish by the following Saturday and a parking ticket with fragments of a dream scribbled on the back. Old car with hinges folds down into a suitcase. Every time Loo used the toilet or took a bath, she faced her mother’s words, watching the letters bleed together over the years and the ink fade from the steam of the shower.

The dead woman was an ever-present part of their lives. When Loo did something well, her father said: Just like your mother, and when she did something bad, her father said: Your mother would never approve.

Loo squeezed the trigger. She did it again and again, reloading for over an hour, occasionally nicking bark from the tree but missing the target every time, until there was a pile of brass shells at her feet and her arm ached from the weight of the gun.

“The mark’s too small,” said Loo. “I’ll never hit it.”

Hawley pulled a wallet of tobacco from his pocket and shook it back and forth at her. Loo put down the gun. She walked over and took the pouch from him, as well as a package of rolling papers. She slid one thin piece of paper away from the rest, folded it in half with her finger and then tucked some of the tobacco along the crease. Then she placed the filter and began rolling, pinching the ends, licking the edge to seal the fold. She handed the cigarette to her father, and he lit it and settled onto a rock nearby, leaning into the sun. He had started a beard, as he did whenever the weather turned cold, and he scratched it now, his fingers catching in the wiry brown hair.

“You’re thinking too much.”

Loo tossed the pouch at him, then picked up the rifle again. Her father had hardly spoken during the lesson, as if he expected her to already know how to shoot. She’d been excited when they started, but now she was losing her nerve—in the same way she did in the bathroom surrounded by scraps of her mother’s words and cans of her mother’s favorite foods and pictures of her mother’s effortless beauty.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

The tide was coming in. Loo could hear the ocean beyond the ravine, gathering strength. One wave after another advancing upon the shore. Hawley tucked the roll of tobacco back into his pocket.

“There’s nothing between you and that tree.”

“I’m between it.”

“Then get out of the way.”

Loo flipped the safety on and put the rifle down again. She dug a rock out of the dirt with her fingers and threw it into the woods as far as she could. The rock sailed halfway toward the white mark and then crashed into some bushes. Birds scattered. The sound of a plane passed overhead. Loo looked through the branches at the flash of aluminum in the sky. Thirty thousand feet away and it seemed like an easier target.

Hawley’s cigarette had gone out as he watched her and now he relit the end, striking a match, the ember glowing once, twice, as he brought it to his lips. Then he crushed the cigarette against the rock. He blew smoke out of his mouth.

“You need a mask.” Hawley lifted his giant hands and covered his own face. Then he opened his fingers, framing his eyes and forming a bridge across his nose. It made him look like a stranger. Then Hawley dropped the mask and he was her father again.

“Try it,” he said.

Loo’s hands were not as big but they did the job, closing her off from the woods and her own disappointment. It was like blinders on a horse. Things got blurry or disappeared when she turned her eyes left or right.

“How am I supposed to shoot like this?”

“Use it to focus, then pick up the gun,” said Hawley.

Loo turned back toward the target. The sun was beginning to set. The white spot of paint caught the light and was glowing. What surrounded the tree—the earth, the sky, its own branches—fell away. This was how her father must see things, she thought. A whole world of bull’s-eyes.

Just then, beyond the mark, there was a shuffling of leaves. Some kind of movement in the woods. Loo dropped her hands from her face. She held her breath. She heard only the sound of the wind. The rattle of birch leaves flipping back and forth. The distant echo of the plane in the clouds. The scratch of a squirrel’s claws as it scrambled up the bark of a tree. But her father was listening for something else. His chin was down, his eyes cutting left. His face tensed and ready.

Hawley was always watching. Always waiting. He got the same look when they went into town for supplies, when the mailman came to their door, when a car pulled alongside them on the road. She heard him late at night, walking the living room floor, checking the locks on the windows. Digging on the beach for clams, he kept his back to the sea. These were small things, but she noticed. And she noticed now, as his whole body became still. He reached behind to his belt, and his hand came back with the Colt.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01GBAKAYI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Dial Press (March 28, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 28, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3418 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 399 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #143,204 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #677 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- #971 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- #979 in Coming of Age Fiction (Kindle Store)

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4.2 2,793 ratings

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Hannah Tinti

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Hannah Tinti is the author of the bestselling novel The Good Thief, which won The Center for Fiction’s first novel prize, and the story collection Animal Crackers, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her latest novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, is a national bestseller and is in development for television with Netflix. She teaches creative writing at New York University’s MFA program and co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. Tinti is also the co-founder and executive editor of One Story magazine, which won the AWP Small Press Publisher Award, CLMP’s Firecracker Award, a 2020 Whiting Prize, and the PEN/Magid Award for Excellence in Editing. For more info, visit hannahtinti.com

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Victoria Weisfeld

From the bullet holes on the cover to the last page, a stunningly good read!

Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2017

Verified Purchase

Samuel Hawley wears the evidence of his past brushes with death on his skin, in the form of scarred-over bullet wounds that are the organizing principle of this fine book. Chapters describing the circumstances under which he got “Bullet Number One,” etc., are interspersed with chapters about his peaceful, if not uneventful, life with his late wife Lily and daughter Loo. Although Hawley is a criminal and the book details his many crimes, it’s also about love and retribution. It’s about universals as ancient as the twelve labors of Hercules.
Many chapters are told from the third-person point of view of the adolescent Loo. Typical of teenagers, she is mostly uncurious about her father’s past, accepting his scars and his affinity for firearms as merely the familiar backdrop of her own story. When the book opens, he’s retired from his life of crime, yet its first lines are “When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun.”
Hawley had a couple of misspent decades, starting with an armed robbery when he was a runaway teenager. His escapades were mostly as muscle-and-gun-for-hire on behalf of someone else, and several of them involved the acquisition of rare and costly timepieces. Gold pocket watches with diamond and sapphire star charts embedded in the case, a rare and ancient water clock called a clepsydra. Hawley hauled the cash, made the trade, returned with the goods. If only it always went that smoothly.
Tinti’s choice of time-pieces, and a few other recurrent themes in the narrative—celestial navigation, a great humpback whale, even water—give the book depth and resonance. If you prefer to focus on the fates of Loo and her father, both terrifically engaging characters, these themes do not intrude. (Apparently, the novel has already been optioned for television.)
Loo and Hawley have a strong, believable, and loving relationship, but their interactions with Lily’s mother, Mabel Ridge, are far more prickly and at times hilarious. When Lily had arranged for Hawley to meet her mother the first time, she was rightly apprehensive, but he was so in love with her, he was willing to face that Gorgon. “‘Right now,’ said Lily, ‘I’m glad you don’t have any parents.’ ‘Me, too,’ said Hawley. But he was lying. There’d been plenty of times over the past six months when he’d wished he had someone to show Lily off to.”
Tinti’s writing is full of similarly honest, unsentimental devotion. The only time his bond with Loo is seriously threatened is when the troublemaking Mabel Ridge makes a devastating accusation against him. When Loo confronts him, Hawley reacts in a way only this deeply imagined character could.
Tinti effectively describes their coastal people whose lives depend on the cold bite of the Atlantic Ocean and a continuing supply of fish. Among the townspeople is a lone, but inevitable woman doggedly advocating for making the locals’ fishing grounds—the Bitter Banks—a marine sanctuary. If you want to turn yourself into a hometown pariah, this is a good strategy.
Loo finally comes to understand the woman and her motivation, one that could serve as a summary of the whole book: the desperate need to be loved. She sees that people’s hearts are “cycling through the same madness—the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair—like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun.” This desperation is as true for Hawley, with the ever-present likelihood his crimes will one day catch up to him, as for any of them. Or us.

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Jack Kruse

Criminal-Murder-Thief-Father-Hercules?

Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2017

Verified Purchase

Let me just get it out of the way and say that Chapter 15 will break your heart. I listened to the final minutes of that chapter while parked in traffic on the 295 and found myself muttering under my breath: “no no no no no no no no.” I pushed stop on the Audible app when the chapter was over and didn’t pick the book back up until the next day. That’s the kind of book Twelve Lives is. It pulls you into the lives, minds and hearts of the characters in unexpected ways and with an unanticipated depth.

I came across Twelve Lives in a New York Times book review back in April. Since then it had rested dormant on my Amazon wish list.

That is, until I recently changed part of my reading strategy to listening to only fiction audiobooks during my afternoon commute which put me in the market for a great tale. I had been listening to books from my productivity reading list during my afternoon commutes for much of the past year but found it pretty much impossible to take any form of notes. This became especially problematic when it came time to write a review (like this one). Thus my switch to fiction versus non-fiction audiobooks.

I think my own biggest challenge with digesting and capturing the salient points from the books I read is timeliness. At any point in time, I am typically working my way through about 3 books: 1 on my kindle, 1 work book*, and 1 audiobook. I like to mix these up between productivity/betterment, fiction and african literature. Thus it’s difficult to set aside roughly one hour to put together one of these reviews. But as Stavridis points out The Leader’s Bookshelf, it’s not enough for a leader to just read, rather “a strong leader reads but also processes what he or she is reading to create real thoughts”i--i.e., writing down those thoughts and sharing them.

The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is a modern day adaptation of Peisander’s play “The 12 Labors of Hercules.” In that ancient Greek tale, after murdering his wife and children in a goddess-induced fit of insanity, Hercules sets out to atone for his sins by completing 12 fantastic, near-impossible quests over a 12 year period. It’s in this redemptive quest, that he becomes a hero of legendary and mythic proportions.

The genius of author Hannah Tinti’s story is that she layers several tragic love stories onto this epic framework. These cover the gambit: from man and woman, to father and daughter, to platonic between two friends,and to daughter and mother. The tragic nature of the stories comes from the common thread of absence that is woven into each of them.

Mechanically, Twelve Lives overlays the history of the 12 bullets that struck Samuel Hawley during his life with the his daughter Lou’s own coming of age, as she slowly uncovers her father’s sordid criminal past. It’s in the convergence of these two stories that the climax approaches.

Ultimately, Twelve Lives benefits from the strength of using an age old tale for its framework--because of this--and because of Tinti’s strong and striking prose (not to mention a keen ear for dialogue) this is a story that you won’t soon forget.

P.S. I’d be remiss not to praise the Audiobook narrator Elizabeth Wiley’s phenomenal job. She dove into the work and smoothly worked through the voices of multiple characters seamlessly.

*I average almost one book a month at work by reading in short snippets on the john, while waiting at meetings and every time my computer requires an NMCI reboot. I imagine I am the only person at the Navy Yard scribbling notes sitting on the toilet.

Key Takeaways:
The cumulative effect of small decisions over the course of a lifetime. This idea of this is echoed in just about every productivity book out there. Doing one small thing for a few minutes a day over the course of a year (or lifetime) can reap huge benefits. In the case of Hawley we see the deleterious effect of a lifetime of bad decisions.
The quest for redemption is one that can cover a plethora of sins--the power of Hawley’s quest (and Tinti’s superb writing) makes a violent criminal/sometimes murderer into a halfway likable character.
This would be a great book to reread more closely with the original Hercules story--then you could draw upon parallels and differences.
Father’s have a tremendous and distinct influence upon their daughters--make the most of it.
Tinti writes so well--it should inspire any wannabe writer.

Key Quotes:
“Everything breaks if you hit it hard enough.”
“Love isn't about keeping promises. It's about knowing someone better than anyone else. I'm the only one who knows him. I'm the only one who ever will.”
“He tore at her clothing like he was searching for something she had stolen from him.”
“For the first time he had something to lose, and it was funny how that changed things, how it made Hawley imagine himself living past the next day, into the next week, the next year. He’d started wearing his seatbelt. He brushed his teeth. Sometimes he fell so deeply inside his new life that the edges of himself felt like they were coming loose. Then Lily would catch him in one of his old habits—checking and rechecking the locks, or doubling back on streets when he thought they were being followed—and the years he’d spent alone would rise up solidly around him, resonating in the dark like blood pushed out of a pinprick.”
"… Hawley's scars were signs of previous damage that had impacted his life long before she was born. And like the moon, Hawley was always circling between Loo and the rest of the universe."
There was a taste that filled Loo's mouth whenever she was getting ready to hit someone, tangy like rust. She could feel the glands on either side of her jaw as if she'd bitten her tongue. The first few times the taste came slowly, but soon it flooded her mouth whenever a situation was turning against her. Then the pool took over her senses and for a moment she crossed over and became another person, a powerful person even if it lasted only until someone punched her back.
Key References:
Tufts Summary of Hercules' 12 Labors
MIT hosting of Euripedes' Heracles play
NYT Book Review
NPR Interview with Tinti
Washington Post Book Review
Hannah Tinti is the editor and co-founder of “One Story” literary magazine.

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christine

Make room, Herman

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2017

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A great story, with past and present alternating artfully. Two lead characters you really care about. I finished it in a sprint -- needing to find out. The prose is at times lyrical and at others richly detailed. The detail is where it transcends; the amount of research required to keep that detail true to life must have been prodigious. How else could Tinti know that, in field dressing a sucking chest wound, you should apply plastic loosely over the bullet hole?

A day or two after I finished, it came to me: Tinti's writing is more like Melville's than any I have seen since -- well, since Moby Dick. She may not be there yet, but she is well on the way.

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Richiedog

Sam Hawley is a bad man

Reviewed in Canada on April 22, 2017

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This book is a page turner. A father and his daughter are always running away from her dad's troubles. She's been to five different schools and they finally settle where she was born. One chapter is about the present and the next is about her Dad getting shot. A great read.

ger

Library book delivered.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 16, 2021

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Not sure how I ended up reciveing a new library book

Catherine Robinson

Four Stars

Reviewed in Canada on January 26, 2018

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Reading this now and I am enjoying the clever back and forth stories of the father and daughter.

Robert Hunter

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on December 19, 2017

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Enjoyed it...great read..

Steve

Not good/Not bad

Reviewed in Canada on January 11, 2018

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Not sure why it is getting the rave reviews/accolades. The premise sounds good. But really not a heck of a lot ever happens. The two main characters are unappealling.It's one of those books that you can't really recommend but also can't say don't read. So best you take a chance.

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