What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me

by Donna Gordon

Overview

"...wonderfully evocative prose..." ~Andre Dubus III

WHAT BEN FRANKLIN WOULD HAVE TOLD ME explores the story of Lee, a vibrant thirteen-year-old boy who is facing premature death from Progeria (a premature aging disease); his caretaker TomÁs, a survivor of Argentina's Dirty War, who is searching for his missing wife, who was pregnant when they were both "disappeared;" and Lee's single mother, Cass, overwhelmed by love for her son and the demands of her work as a Broadway makeup artist. When a mix-up prevents Cass from taking Lee on his "final wish" trip to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia to pursue his interest in the life of Ben Franklin, TomÁs—who has discovered potential leads to his family in both cities—offers to accompany Lee on the trip. As one flees memories of death and the other hurtles inevitably toward it, they each share unsettling truths and find themselves transformed in the process. Set during the Ronald Reagan presidency, this lyrical novel transcends an adventure story to take the reader on an unforgettable journey.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646032303
Publisher:	Regal House Publishing
Publication date:	06/08/2022
Pages:	330
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Donna Gordon graduated from Brown, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, a PEN Discovery, and a Ploughshares Discovery. She received the New Letters Publication Prize in fiction, and her writing has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Story Quarterly, Post Road, The Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, the Boston Globe Magazine, Solstice, and others. Her work with former political prisoners culminated in “Putting Faces on the Unimaginable: Portraits and Interviews with Former Prisoners of Conscience." What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is her first novel. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband and two sons.

Editorial Reviews

"This largehearted, beautifully written novel takes us on an unforgettable quest with an unforgettable character. Lee, the charming, vibrant, dying child at the novel’s core, reminds us that the true source of light is in the people around us and that each moment offers us the choice of how best to spend our precious hours on this earth. Compassionate, funny, and deeply moving, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is full to the brim with intelligence and love." —Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds and Night at the Fiestas

 

"This story belongs to Lee, a child whose questioning mind and uncanny eloquence will teach you how to die and how to live, and ultimately how to survive beyond the final pages of Donna Gordon’s astonishing novel, What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me." —Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications

 

"What Ben Franklin Would Have Told Me is a fascinating, heartrending novel that will challenge what you thought you knew about the human condition." —Rachel Weaver, author of Point of Direction

"Behind this wonderfully evocative prose is a deeply compassionate writer who has created here an unforgettable main character - Lee, an ill-fated boy whose strength and humor and soul-deep resilience I will not soon forget."—Andre Dubus III, author of Gone So Long: A Novel and House of Sand and Fog

"Set during the Ronald Reagan presidency, this lyrical novel transcends an adventure story to take the reader on an unforgettable journey." —Midwest Book Review

"A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

★ 2022-10-17
A boy with a fatal disease sets out to help a political refugee restore his shattered family in Gordon’s debut coming-of-age novel.

In the late 1970s, Lee Adams is just 12 years old and has a rare condition called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, which causes his cells to age rapidly. He weighs only 35 pounds and has the wizened appearance of a bald, 102-year-old man; he’s also plagued by arteriosclerosis and arthritis and is likely to die from a heart attack or blood clot in his teens. He has a sharp mind and a keen interest in American history, especially Benjamin Franklin’s motivational wisdom; he wants to indulge this interest during a long-anticipated trip from his Newark, New Jersey, home to Washington, D.C., accompanied by his mom, Cass, and soul mate, Kira Throop, a 13-year-old girl who also has progeria. After Kira dies suddenly, Cass finds herself unable to take off work, so she insists that Lee make the trip anyway, accompanied by newly hired caretaker Tomás Concepción. Lee is suspicious of Tomás, who drags him around Washington on mysterious errands, but the boy finally gets him to tell him what’s going on: He’s an Argentinian journalist who was jailed and tortured in his home country three years ago along with his wife, Violeta; he’s now searching for news of her and their baby, who he fears may have been taken away and sold on the black market. Lee eagerly joins in Tomás’ quest, and they’re helped by Margaret, a Washington Postreporter, and Alicia, an Argentinian expat connected to the “Abuelas,” an underground network of women who gather information about the disappeared. Lee and the others finally uncover leads that may result in the reunion of Tomás’ family—and also learn why this might be a bad idea.Gordon’s novel is a plangent study of a fearsome disease, depicted in language that’s raptly evocative but never sentimental: “There weren’t any words created that could say why he was on this treadmill with time, or why his collarbones were disintegrating like limestone, or why his spine felt like a brittle trail of broken teeth.” It’s also a dark, gripping investigation of Argentina’s experience with brutal dictatorship in the 1970s and ’80s, full of paranoia and sinister, Kafkaesque atmospherics, as when a character watches secret police descend on her family’s house in Buenos Aires: “She…saw the shadows of two figures being hauled out of her parents’ house—first her father, who had difficulty walking, then her mother sagging behind….She knew she would never see her parents again.” Gordon’s prose is vivid and subtly allusive, conjuring character and feeling from details of appearance and behavior, as in a description of Tomás’ “industrial lunch box and paratrooper shoes” and how he has the “depressed cross-eyed delirium of an undertaker.” The end result is a searching meditation on mortality and hope that’s all the more powerful for being filtered through the quirky point of view of a child.

A soulful journey that offers surprises and unforeseen victories.

Kirkus Reviews