Hank and Chloe
by Jo-Ann Mapson
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060924640
Publisher: HarperCollins
Set amid the sprawling suburbs and the wild canyons of Southern
California, Hank & Chloe is the story of a pair of seemingly mismatched
lovers: he, a solitary scholar from a staid family; she, a former foster child
eking out a marginal existence.
Chloe Morgan, full-time waitress and part-time horse trainer, is called to
help a mare through a troubled labor. Despite Chloe's efforts and the
ministrations of the vet she calls, the mare dies. The horse's owner takes
Chloe to his community college office, where she borrows a shirt from
another professor, Henry "Hank" Oliver. This encounter is the beginning of
the unlikely relationship between rough, independent Chloe and reserved,
settled Hank.
When Hank visits Chloe's home, a shack in a squatter's community, she
takes him into her arms--and, more reluctantly, into her life. Shortly after
Hank and Chloe begin their relationship, Chloe's home is raided. She is
injured and arrested, and her beloved dog Hannah runs off. Hank hires a
lawyer and brings Chloe to live with him while she recovers.
As the novel chronicles Hank and Chloe's relationship, it explores love in its
myriad forms, including the pair's unresolved relationships from the past
and a brooding passion for the besieged landscape.
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1. On the first page of the novel, Chloe answers the door to her home, which is a shack in a squatter community populated with illegal aliens and owned by a landlord resisting pressure to sell his land to developers. What battles are waged in the book over this "last frontier"? How is the land an integral part of the novel?
2. In the second chapter, Hank teaches his class the story of two lovers, Eurydice and Orpheus. From classical mythology we know that when Eurydice died, Orpheus followed her to the underworld to ask Hades for her return. Hades agreed, on the condition that Orpheus walk ahead of Eurydice and not look back at her until they reached the earth. At the last minute Orpheus looked back and Eurydice vanished. How is this story paralleled in Hank and Chloe? Do other elements of folklore in the book have echoes in the story?
3. Ghosts, both literal and figurative, haunt the characters of this story. Hank mourns his dead sister, "the small pink ghost he got to see grow up." Chloe hears voices in the desert belonging to "people who had died long before, whose very lives had been erased by time and progress, but who weren't quite done speaking their piece." What do these and other specters from the past have to do with the present action of the story? What part do they play in all of our lives?
4. Mothers are in short supply in this novel. As the story opens, Chloe helps to deliver a foal from a dying mare. Chloe and her young friend Kit were both abandoned by their mothers. Though Hank's mother is alive, she emotionally abandoned him when his sister died. How are the characters of this novel affected by the absence of their mothers? Do they come to any resolution with their loss?
5. Chloe trains horses and teaches riding. How is she like the horses she knows so well?
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