Book Review: The Monsters of Templeton

Lauren Groff’s debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, is a hilarious amalgam of historical fiction, ghost story, ancestral search, and girl-comes-home-in-disgrace.

Interested?

On the morning Willie Upton returns home to Templeton, New York–based on Groff’s hometown of Cooperstown, home of the baseball hall of fame–the sea monster that has lived in Lake Glimmerglass for decades floats to the surface, dead.  Willie has fled Alaska, where she was on an archaeology dig as part of her nearly finished PhD program, to confess to her mother that she’s pregnant by her thesis advisor.

Awkward much?

Well, the hits keep coming for Willie when her mother, Vivienne, drops another life bomb on her:  she isn’t the product of a hippie commune as Vi always told her.  Instead, her father lives in Templeton–a town very close to WIllie’s and Vi’s hearts, since they are descended from the town’s founder, Marmaduke Temple.  What’s more, her father is apparently descended illegitimately from the Temple family tree.  Since Vi refuses to give up his name, Willie immediately locks herself in the town library to figure out her father’s identity by detecting which of her ancestors might have fooled around and had a kid out of wedlock.

The stakes raise for Willie as she delves deeper into the history of both her family and her town.  She and her fellow Templetonians mourn the death of the lake monster.  The resident ghost in her childhood bedroom wants her to find something.  And her mother has become a born-again Christian.

Willie enlists help from the Running Buds, a group of six middle-aged men who have been running together every morning for decades; her best friend Clarissa, a journalist living in San Francisco; and two now-grown-up boys she went to high school with.  The results are sometimes poignant and always hilarious.

This book is pure fun.  That said, I was very attached to Willie–and while I appreciated the moments in which the author took a chapter or two to speak from a historical character’s perspective, I missed Willie’s take on things.  Still, I enjoyed reading this a ton.

Happy reading!