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Author of the novels Meantime
and Halfway House
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About Meantime

About Meantime

"Nicole wasn't actually my stepsister, but no other word fit any better.  My father and her mother had fallen in love on a church committee.  Breaking up two families would have caused needless damage, and so the adults decided that all seven of us should move to a new house together...."

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And so we're introduced to the two unlikely siblings at the heart of Meantime.  Katharine Noel-- the award winning author of the national bestseller Halfway House--delivers a funny, wise and moving novel of the stories we tell about the past, and how they inform our understanding of the present as well as our choices for the future.

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Claire Hood's unconventional upbringing in the "Naked Family"-- as they were infamously nicknamed by their suburban neighbors--taught her to embrace the unexpected.  Now in her thirties, Claire has a husband, Jeremy, who longs to start a family, but Claire's blueprint in life is to avoid an ordinary existence at all costs.

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At the same time, her stepsister Nicole has set her mind to having a baby on her own.  Just as Nicole needs Claire more than ever, Jeremy falls seriously ill and his high school girlfriend resurfaces to lend a hand in his recovery.  Everything Claire thinks she values--and everything she imagines about the kind of person she wants to be-- is thrown into question.  

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With grace, humanity, and humor, Katharine Noel examines the complex, delicate connections between parents and children, spouses, and siblings.  Meantime is a heartfelt, insightful novel of how individuals shape and reshape their families-- both given and chosen--while discovering their truest sense of self.  

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About Katharine

About Katharine 

photo by  Anna Carson Dewitt 

Katharine’s first novel, Halfway House, was a New York Times Editors' Choice, winner of a Ken/NAMI Award for "outstanding literary contributions to a better understanding of mental illness," and winner of the 2006 Kate Chopin prize for fiction.  She has been the Writer in Residence at Claremont McKenna College and the Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where she also held Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships. Katharine lives with her husband, the writer Eric Puchner, and their children in Baltimore, Maryland, where she teaches at Johns Hopkins University and is at work on a new novel.

CONTACT
other work

Essay on Siblings in YA lit:  link coming soon 

 

 

 Other Work  

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Interview on writing Meantime

First novel, Halfway House:

One day, Angie Voorster-- diligent student, all-star swimmer, and Ivy League-bound high school senior-- dives to the bottom of a pool and stays there.  In that moment, everything the Voorster family believes they know about each other changes.  As Angie swings between manic highs and dangerous lows, the Voorsters struggle to maintain the appearance of an ideal New England family.  It is only when Angie is finally able to fend for herself that the family allows itself to fall apart and then regather in a new, fundamentally changed way. Halfway House shows a world where love is imperfect, and longing for an imagined ideal can both destroy one family's happiness and offer it redemption.

 

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Where did we get the idea that families are durable? Christmas cards? Prime time TV? Katharine Noel's sure-footed debut, "Halfway House," tells the darker truth: most families — the ordinary ones, the sturdy-looking ones — are tinderboxes. Spark them and they blow.
--New York Times 
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Essay on the centrality of siblings in YA lit

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