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Ms. Hempel Chronicles

3.38 of 5 stars 3.38 · rating details · 1,073 ratings · 294 reviews

Ms. Beatrice Hempel, teacher of seventh grade, is new—new to teaching, new to the school, newly engaged, and newly bereft of her idiosyncratic father. Grappling awkwardly with her newness, she struggles to figure out what is expected of her in life and at work. Is it acceptable to introduce swear words into the English curriculum, enlist students to write their own report...more

Hardcover, 208 pages

Published September 8th 2008 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Jan 08, 2009 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2009

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: "SHARP GRACEFUL PROSE" + "LUSH POETIC IMAGERY" = "AIMLESS NAVEL-GAZING MESS".

Is it some kind of chick-lit thing? I mean, this book shows up on various "best of" lists for last year, so I figured it must be worthwhile. Right?

Maybe if you teach 7th graders. Actually, it's condescending to 7th grade teachers to imply that they should be satisfied with this book. It's an amorphous mess. I suppose the jacket blurb should have warned me - by now I should have know the code. When re...more

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Dec 24, 2008 Anne rated it 1 of 5 stars

I finished this book yesterday and I'm starting to believe that I may need to read it again. Not because I enjoyed it, but actually quite the opposite. I found this book difficult to get into and the main character, Ms. Hempel, self-congratulatory and irritating. The problem is that this book keeps appearing on "Best of 2008" lists and otherwise receiving wonderful write-ups. It makes me think I really must have missed something. Similar to The Wonder Spot, this book focuses on the same charact...more

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Dec 03, 2008 Natalie rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have been waiting for something from Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum since Madeleine is Sleeping which I adored.

Ms. Hempel appears to us in a series of short stories from different parts of her life, mostly as a young 7th grade teacher full of contradictions - poised to enrich the lives of hundreds of children in their prime as she is told by a former teacher "if you ever had a novel in you, it's gone now." Bynum writes about Ms. Hempel's youthful idealism, her want to be the cool young teacher, her wan...more

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Jan 17, 2009 Erin Malone rated it 5 of 5 stars

I love this collection of short stories. This author has a great, natural, funny and sensitive voice. All of the stories are connected, but the spaces between them made this captivating, and I found myself wondering what happened while I was gone. . . .

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Feb 27, 2009 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009-reads

Here's to you, Anne Cahoo-hoo-hoon. Part of what makes this book so good is that it's hard to understand why it's so good, and therefore I don't know that I'd ever have come to it on my own.

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Nov 17, 2011 deejah added it

This was a week where I had no idea what I was going to read. Then I happened upon this article http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-an... where author Jonathan Franzen (THE CORRECTIONS) recommended four ovelooked books. I love when instances like this occur, since I was truly drawing a blank as to which book would be the winner this week.

What this "novel" winds up being is a series of short stories featuring Ms. Hempel. She is a 7th grade teacher that tries to impress on her students that the wor...more

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Mar 05, 2009 Phoebe rated it 3 of 5 stars

Funny, I read this book at the same time as reading "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers and found that they had a very similar arc and storytelling style. True, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is much quieter in her descriptions than Eggers, but they both have a way of very subtly slipping details in and assuming the reader is smart enough to follow and glean the plot changes without totall spelling it out for them. Both books also are told from an age distance as each looks back ov...more

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Jan 18, 2009 Diane rated it 1 of 5 stars

The "chronicles" describes repeatedly how great but yet so humble a person this ms hempel is. And it is especially annoying when you see that this is a thinly-disguised autobiography of the author. I read "The Yurt" in the New Yorker, and I found it really clever and funny because made fun of people who are teachers, and it accounts for the fact that teachers are actually humans, which seems to be a big suprise for people who seem to want to hold on to their one-dimensional perceptions of all te...more

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Feb 16, 2013 Justin Evans rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Another victim of misguided marketing, although nobody will be crying for SLB, since the misguided marketing led to award nominations and many goodreads reviews. The problem can be easily summed up: Franzen's blurb describes this book--about, among other things, the uncomfortably erotic nature of teaching, divorce, the horrors of history and the difficulties of teaching it, the awfulness of puberty, the inhumane but unavoidable way we categorise each other, and the French diseases of the soul*--...more Another victim of misguided marketing, although nobody will be crying for SLB, since the misguided marketing led to award nominations and many goodreads reviews. The problem can be easily summed up: Franzen's blurb describes this book--about, among other things, the uncomfortably erotic nature of teaching, divorce, the horrors of history and the difficulties of teaching it, the awfulness of puberty, the inhumane but unavoidable way we categorise each other, and the French diseases of the soul*--he describes *this* book as 'pure pleasure.' There are roughly two possible explanations for this. One is that Franzen, as a good GWAMA**, thinks anything written by a woman that is less than 600 pages long must, eo ipso, be entertainment rather than art. That seems unlikely.
But it's entirely possible that it happened indirectly: that this book got assimilated to the canon of American Liberal Literature, to which great purgatory moderately well written, lightly entertaining books about Democrat party approved themes like education and gender go when they die. And since this book is not only about a woman, but by one, that's its obvious resting place.

Except this is more intellectually challenging and rewarding than anything Franzen or the other GWAMAs of ALL has ever written. The episodic structure mimics the life of a teacher (one year at a time, each year succeeding the other in a weird change-but-no-change kind of way, until you realize that something incredibly strange has happened). Unlike most art about education, we see the teacher develop, rather than the students--indeed, (spoiler) she develops right out of being a teacher. The tediousness, hopelessness and outright fear of being an educator come through clearly: what right do we have to teach others? is this weirdly public life anything other than a performance? how does one balance the yearning to be loved with the need to be, often enough, hated? and how does anyone ever get to be an adult when the adults themselves are borderline failures?

Add to all that the lightly written ruminations on history and authenticity (i.e., both constructed, but not for all that meaningless), and it becomes clear that the right comparison is that other apparently charming, but deeply disturbing novel of education and social history, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

*: see Heather Lelache in Ursula Le Guin's 'Lathe of Heaven'
**: Great White American Male Author(less)

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Aug 19, 2012 Melinda rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This collection of stories posing as a novel had some problems. I don't know any seventh grade teacher who would teach To Kill a Mockingbird, This Boy's Life, or Romeo and Juliet. Ms. Hempel's argument "justifying" the language of the Wolfe autobiography would never cut the mustard with parents of my seventh graders. Also, Ms. Hempel is an English teacher, but it was obvious that Ms. Bynum could have used an English teacher to assist with grammar, at least to explain how to use colons properly....more

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Jun 23, 2011 Andrea rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-general, read-2011

2.5 stars, actually, because I liked half of the book. Indeed, I loved the first 3 chapters - I felt like so much information was packed into each well-crafted sentence, and that the observations about teachers and students and parents were so right on.

The last 100 pages or so just fell apart. Bynum started jumping large bits of time, leaving me feeling disoriented. Also, it is dropped in after more than a hundred pages that Beatrice is Asian-American, then a few pages later that she is half Asi...more

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Oct 11, 2010 Lisa Cindrich rated it 4 of 5 stars

A collection of short stories about a young middle school teacher. The early stories, which focus on the students and on Ms. Hempel in the classroom, are hilarious. These fictional kids are as unique, funny, and vulnerable as any real-life adolescents. And Ms. Hempel's struggle to find her feet as a teacher--"not a very good teacher"-- is wonderful. Hard to decide which kid I adored most. Maybe "Edward Ashe, former piano prodigy, who by eighth grade had settled into a catatonic state interrupted...more

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Sep 08, 2010 Emily rated it 3 of 5 stars

I think this is a 3.5 star review. I picked up Bynum's two books after loving a story of hers in the New Yorker. I read the first one really fast, even though I was told it was hard to get through. Then I started this one and thought it'd be a breeze. It wasn't, actually. But not because it was bad... instead I think I went slowly because I was trying to commit certain parts to memory. I thought it was really an interesting story of one woman and the way she thinks. I related to her. I empathize...more

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May 24, 2010 Nicola rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

There's a lot to find charming about Ms Hempel Chronicles, a fictional memoir of a seventh-grade teacher. Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum has a talent for capturing the quirks of humanity, and all of her characters are lovingly drawn. Her descriptions of middle school life feel joyously, heartbreakingly true. And, two or three times, the narrative builds to a moment of lovely poignancy.

As a novel, however, it never quite comes together. It feels like a character study -- and not a particularly satisfying...more

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Apr 20, 2009 Grace rated it 3 of 5 stars

At times, this story collection was fantastic reading. At other times, it was merely well-written. They vary between the tedious and the sublime.

Overall, this book captured the beauty and melancholy of middle school kids and their young, rookie teacher. I highly recommend the collection. Although the stories share a common cast of characters, they can stand alone. If a particular story becomes a chore, skip to the next one.

Funny Aside: I put this in a pile of books which I selected for my 4th g...more

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Jan 31, 2011 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s first novel, Madeleine is Sleeping, was a National Book Award finalist in 2004. Her second, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. I think I see why.

The similes are sensuous: “An ancient compliment would suddenly, unexpectedly, descend upon her, spinning down from the sky like a solitary cherry blossom” (31). The details describe ordinary gratifications many of us share but do not speak: The bathtub was “long enough that you could submerge...more Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s first novel, Madeleine is Sleeping, was a National Book Award finalist in 2004. Her second, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. I think I see why.

The similes are sensuous: “An ancient compliment would suddenly, unexpectedly, descend upon her, spinning down from the sky like a solitary cherry blossom” (31). The details describe ordinary gratifications many of us share but do not speak: The bathtub was “long enough that you could submerge yourself entirely and still not feel anything pressing against your head or your feet” (78). The images stick. Rather than say, “The school buzzed the day of the show,” Bynum describes the magically mundane: “Older girls came leaping down the stairs, fishnet stockings streaming behind them like pennants” (2).

She employs synesthesia without being obnoxious: “The air!... It smelled the way early music sounded: thin, feverish, slightly out of tune” (112). She writes complex sentences with semi-colons and colons – check out the string on pages 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, and 61 – without seeming overly academic. Because Ms. Hempel, the quasi-anti-heroine teacher, is full of conviction and self-effacing grace, the semi-colons feel like winks, the colons like sideways pairs of eyes looking ahead to whatever thought comes next.

Bynum makes what could simply be the annoying thoughts of a teacher seem sympathetic. Ms. Hempel mentally tallies her weaknesses using vocabulary words. She needs to have an opinion about every student, but won’t make snap judgments. “Ms. Hempel,” Bynum writes, “was actively developing her sensitivity to the appropriate and inappropriate” (4). She questions herself, her profession: “Why become a teacher, she wondered, if you had difficulty with authority figures? Or maybe, it occurred to her, that’s why you did become a teacher” (9).

Bynum captures equally well the nature of her private school 7th grade students, none of whom need to worry about “working as itinerant laborers on an isolated and soul-crushing ranch,” and who are apparently very intelligent (7). They read Romeo & Juliet; they have intelligent conversations about This Boy’s Life; they compose scenes where they assume the perspectives of Jamestown settler children conversing with their grandfathers about the belongings they brought to America; one of them writes a sixteen-page “first person narrative imagined from the perspective of a minor character in Elie Wiesel’s Night” (156). They organize a beach potluck with fried plantains, sesame noodles, and rice balls without teacher assistance. All of which struck me as odd if not overachieving until I remembered that that's how private schools might be: odd and overachieving.

One thing I will take away from this is a lesson for my own writing: in my writing about teaching I should include thoughts and scenes from my home life. By the time I finished this book, I realized I knew a lot about Ms. Hempel. As a child, “She had no cigarettes with which to practice, so she rolled up a little piece of paper and held it together with Scotch tape” (90). She went to high school with her fiancé; he was a cross-country runner; her two friends caught a glimpse of his penis one day during practice. Now she’s living with the runner, about to get married, and still full of everyday charm. One day when Beatrice Hempel came home from work, her fiancé “tried to lift her off the floor, but he wasn’t quite tall enough, so she gave a little push and folded up her legs, and it was nearly the same as being swept off her feet” (63).

I aspire to such detail describing the beauty of ordinary action.
(less)

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Jul 29, 2009 Kristen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Dec 30, 2010 Maureen Milton rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: adults

This quirky story collection came as something of an antidote to Franzen's compelling but ugly "Freedom." Ms. Hempel, while irritating at times, does provide an accurately loving portrait of the quirks of her 7th graders (and even later of one former student as an adult). I loved her depiction of Harriet Reznick in "Talent." Occasionally, there will be a disarming or funny description: "The air! It delighted her, it was brisk and wood-smoky; it smelled the way early music sounded: thin, feverish...more

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Sep 19, 2012 Elizabeth Moeller rated it 5 of 5 stars

Although I purchased this book several years ago, I hesitated to read this book, which offers short glimpses into the life of Beatrice Hempel, a seventh grade teacher, because of my own experiences teaching. Right after college I spent two years teaching in New York City and I was miserable at it. Even now, if I am feeling particularly stressed, I will have teaching nightmares.
However, once I got over my worries, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of feeling, the detail and the unique insig...more Although I purchased this book several years ago, I hesitated to read this book, which offers short glimpses into the life of Beatrice Hempel, a seventh grade teacher, because of my own experiences teaching. Right after college I spent two years teaching in New York City and I was miserable at it. Even now, if I am feeling particularly stressed, I will have teaching nightmares.
However, once I got over my worries, I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of feeling, the detail and the unique insights which were offered in this book.
Each of the stories offer glimpses into Ms. Hempel's life, so in one chapter she is attending her wedding shower and in another she is telling a colleague not to worry, that she has gotten over breaking up with her fiance. Although such an approach could lead to a fractured whole, it does not and instead it makes it seem that Ms. Hempel is in fact a real person and we are just checking in with her, at various parts of her life.
Although the majority of these stories address Ms.Hempel's life as a teacher, there are also elements which address her aspirations towards punk rock as a teenager and her conflicted identity growing up with a Chinese mother and a white father.
Although I enjoyed all of these other views Ms. Hempel's character, the former teacher in me definitely enjoyed those portions of the book the best. The following paragraph had me laughing out loud on the bus in recognition: "Ms. Hempel was sometimes astonished by the thoughts she'd have while walking to work: one morning she looked longingly at a patch of ice on the pavement and realized that if she were to fall and fracture her leg in several places, then she wouldn't have to go to school. And maybe, if the doctors put her in traction, a substitute would be hired for the rest of the year".
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has worked as a teacher for any part of their life, but I also think it will spark a feeling of recognition in anyone who has struggled with finding their path in life. (less)

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Oct 31, 2011 Katie rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was really quirky, but I liked it a lot. It’s not exactly a novel, but also not exactly a collection of short stories. Each chapter features Ms. Hempel, a 8th grade school-teacher, who is still trying to figure herself out. She’s an okay teacher who the kids like, but doesn’t really seem to like teaching much. From chapter to chapter, there is little continuity except for the characters. Things happen unexpectedly – for example, Ms. Hempel is engaged, but there is no indication of that...more

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Jan 27, 2009 Nely rated it 2 of 5 stars

Firstly, I want to start by saying that this was not what I thought it would be. I was expecting the memoir of an English teacher. The book has great reviews and therefore I thought "why not?" Sadly, it wasn’t something that caught my attention. I did read the whole book because it really pains me to actually stop reading something I’ve started - but there was just no point to this. Ms. Hempel is a seventh grade middle school teacher and with a refreshingly real voice gives several insightful th...more

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Oct 17, 2010 Mel rated it 4 of 5 stars

What a startling lovely book! Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a collection of inter-related short stories that center around Ms. Hempel, a middle school teacher. I picked this book up after Jonathan Franzen recommended it as one of his top five books, and I completely understand why this novel scored so high for him. The prose is amazing-- Sarah Shun-lien Bynum manages to pack a lot of telling details into her sentences that still remain light and airy. The majority of the novel focuses on seemingly mu...more

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Jan 16, 2012 Kira rated it 3 of 5 stars

I’ve been searching for one adjective to sum up this book and the best I can come up with is elegant. It’s a simple story, told in clear but beautiful language. It’s not a page-turner, but neither is it dull. And for anyone who’s attended middle school, for anyone who can still name all of their teachers, for anyone who’s wondered how crucial years of their adolescence looked to those on the outside, this book is a poignant bit of nostalgia. "Hempel" is a snapshot of lives joined together for th...more

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Sep 10, 2010 g rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: writers-to-watch

This collection of linked stories has an appealing effervescence to it; young teacher Ms. Hempel's ready identification with her seventh grade students is especially sweet, as is her relationship with her overly supportive father (I about died during the signing-of-the-essay scene). As a teacher Hempel is full of ideals but hilariously lazy in their execution; the entire middle school staff in general is lovingly mocked. I loved the sense of humor and frequently chuckled aloud.

Hempel's character...more

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Nov 29, 2009 Dree rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009-reads

I found this book so close to being great. So close.

Not a novel per se, but a collection of short stories featuring the same main character. This makes it somewhat similar to both Olive Kitteridge A Novel in Stories, which I loved (Olive appears in every story, but not all are from her perspective); and Girl in Hyacinth Blue, one of my favorite books ever (the only "character" that appears in each chapter is a painting, as its provenance is traced through time).

Something, though, about Ms Hempel...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Paula rated it 5 of 5 stars

Quirky, well written book - a window into the life and internal musings of a 7th grade teacher. Few excerpts:

Mother is remodeling and removing Bea's childhood things:
Mother: What do you want me to do? Keep your bedroom hermetically sealed? A shrine to your youth? "Well, YES" that was exactly waht Beatrice wanted. As always, her mother had managed to divine her heart's desire. She had an uncanny ability to do so, which made her refusal to GRANT its secret wishes that much more exasperating.

Tru...more

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Jan 30, 2011 Niree rated it 4 of 5 stars

Bynum interweaves imagination with reality, demonstrating humor in what can sometimes be mundane. Her characterizations of the students and teachers in this charming collection of stories is vivid, but most importantly, realistic. Drawing from personal experience and the creativity of her own mind, Bynum delivers the segmented tale of Ms. Hempel, an entirely relatable and remarkable creation. The reader is left surprised at many bits of story that unfold, but Bynum does not do all the work; inst...more

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Nov 11, 2008 Terry rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Lovely and graceful writing. I'm always suspicious of people who have what I consider sentimental views of children, especially middle schoolers, as the middle schoolers I have worked with are FRIGHTENING CREATURES, and Ms. Hempel's middle schoolers are inspirational sprites. Hmm. But Bynum is a former middle school teacher, so she must know whereof she speaks.

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May 02, 2013 Mac rated it 2 of 5 stars

At first, I thought Ms Hempel Chronicles would be a lot more than the sum of its parts, a series of short stories that would deliver a full novel's worth of plot and character development. The character development is ultimately there; we do have a detailed picture of Ms Hempel, her insecurities, her insights into the students she teaches, and her failures to find happiness. But the overall plot development is incomplete because the stories are elliptical, and they sometimes stop too soon. Speci...more

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Jul 23, 2009 Heather rated it 2 of 5 stars

I went into this with high hopes, based on several reviews I'd read and was majorly disappointed.

That may be due to the fact that I read 3/4 of the book without realizing these were individual short stories and not chapters. In fact, I only discovered my error when I went back online to read some additional reviews.

An innocent mistake, I suppose, but nowhere in this book does it specify that these are short stories. Not in the front flap, back flap, back cover. The only place it is mentioned i...more

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About Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is an American writer.She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter and teaches writing and literature at UC San Diego.

Bynum is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Madeleine is Sleeping was published by Harcourt in 2004 and was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her short stor...more

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Quotes from Ms. Hempel Chronicles

“That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren't enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until the day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at.” — 6 people liked it

“If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?" she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off. To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van."
Chloroform, I guess."
Really?" She brightened. It made her happy that the person she was marrying would commit crimes in the same way as she would.” — 4 people liked it

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