A catchy what-if idea lies at the heart of "The Missing World," an enthralling new novel by Margot Livesey, who, to judge from her previous novels, "Homework" and "Criminals," seems fascinated by the narrow borders dividing madness from sanity, goodness from evil.
To this end, Kazantzis et al. (2004) has described novel methods of assessing homework in therapy research (e.g., the Homework Rating Scale), which include the assessment of homework quality.
Fitzhugh has done his homework: the novel is stuffed with detail on the Nashville star system, on record production, songwriting, recording technology, country western in general and nearly everything else about the making of a hit record, a meteoric singing career -- or a corpse.
"It absolutely upsets us as a community, and we do feel under siege," said Othman Suqi, 44, who recently drove the imam to a mall to buy a novel for a child's homework assignment.
The first 10 or 20 pages, chockablock with strained humor and banal pronouncements (Academy X is "an ethical wonderland in which up is down, and right is wrong"), were so dreadful that getting through this rather thin novel suddenly felt like a homework assignment from hell.
Because of the subject matter, the author undertook significant homework on the novel, asking fellow Times correspondent Anthony Terry for information on V-2 rockets and the German Werewolves.
Remember that writing a novel isn't like boring homework that must be done.
Perhaps it was Goodnight Moon, then The Cat in the Hat, and then kid-oriented novels such as Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine (about an early computer big enough to hold gazillions of smartphones!).
(Short story 3, or a novel extract, will be set as final homework to be handed in at the end of the course in week 24).
(Short story 3, or a novel extract, will be set as final homework to be handed in at the end of the course in session 24).
