I'd like to give this book 3.5 stars. This was good and engaging, but I like her last novel — The Years We Left Home — better. ( )

Jean Thompson's latest novel, The Humanity Project, follows the lives of several forlorn people in the Bay area. Sean and Connor, his son, are about to lose their home. Sean is handyman who is unable to find enough work to support them. Then, after contacting a woman on Craig's List, he is in a mysterious car accident that leaves him in even worse condition. Now he is crippled and unable to work. Connor has to give up his dreams of higher education. He turns to petty theft and ends up becoming a handyman to an older woman, Mrs. Foster. Christie, a home healthcare nurse, is named by Mrs. Foster, a wealthy patient and extreme cat lady, to head a foundation she wants to bequest to pay people to be good to each other. She wants to call it The Humanity Project. Christie's awkward neighbor, Art, an unambitious adjunct professor, struggles to establish some kind of social connection with people. His teenage daughter, Linnea, is sent out to live with him after surviving some mysterious school shooting in Ohio. Linnea and Connor eventually meet and become friends.

So, if all of this sounds depressing, honestly The Humanity Project is depressing as it focuses on this group of various individuals who are doing what they can just to survive. It focuses on some of the major social issues people are facing today: poverty, broken families, violence, estrangement, alienation, homelessness, drug abuse. While focusing on the problems her characters are facing, Thompson is also exploring how much their plight and struggles are directly related to their economic circumstances. No answers are provided as we follow her characters, which are not entirely likeable.

What works is Thompson's superb writing. Even while I was questioning the train-wreck that is every interconnected character's life in this novel, Thompson's ability to render these characters in a very realistic manner allowed me to feel some empathy with their plight. Yes, their lives are a mess and I really wondered how The Humanity Project, which is brought up at almost the half-way point of the book, was going to become a driving force of change. It isn't. It is an idea, a concept, but it isn't brought to fruition in this novel. The ending does offer further explanation on several occurrences and some semblance of closure, but this is not a feel-good happy ending kind of novel.

The rating of The Humanity Project becomes problematic in some ways. It is rife with characters that are down trodden by life and not fulfilled in any way. It is extremely well written and a compelling social commentary, but not an easy book to read. In some ways it felt much longer than the actual pages. Additionally, since it is hard to become totally enmeshed with the characters, I always felt some disconnect with them. This is a serious book.

Highly Recommended, but I know it may not be a good choice for everyone
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Blue Rider Press via Netgalley for review purposes.
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"The Humanity Project" of the title actually didn't make much of an impression on this reader, but the family relationships that were explored made this an enjoyable and thoughtful read. At her best, Thompson captures the telling details of real life, allowing her characters to live in the reader's mind after the book is closed. ( )

Can you pay people to be good? If so, what would it cost?

Jean Thompson's newest novel, The Humanity Project, poses these questions before introducing a wide array of drastically different characters bound together with lose connections. Most of the story centers around Linnea, a teenage girl thrown off course by the shooting that takes place in her high school. Her reactionary, wild behavior causes her mother to send Linnea across the country to live with her father, Art, who she barely knows. Completely unprepared to raise a teenage daughter, Art searches for the help of his neighbor, who is busy working with a client to develop a charity aimed at creating good in the community.

This tangled web of characters actually works well at the start of the novel, as they are introduced one by one. However, Thompson seems to feel much more comfortable voicing some of the characters than others. Where Sean, a single father struggling with an addiction to painkillers, comes across with the perfect blend of self-loathing and apathy, Linnea sometimes sounds too much like a pre-packaged teenager.

As the novel progresses, the connections between the characters reveal themselves and grow. Unfortunately, instead of feeling profound, the addition of minor players serves to unnecessarily complicate the story. And the key is unnecessarily. Layer upon layer of plot eventually begins to work against a novel in some cases, especially when the main question - can you pay people to be good? - becomes an afterthought. The Humanity Project begins with an intriguing idea and solid characters, but loses itself under the weight of its own ambition. ( )

A good read. Although the connections between the characters are a bit implausable, it's a rich, interesting book. Worth getting a copy I could mark up. ( )