Questions About The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb (Goodreads Author)

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Answered Questions (4)

I read the majority of this book , up to around the ancestry letters, and drifted off to read Sue Klebold's memoir. Is it worth returning to?

Deirdre It is worth finishing. The ancestry letters dragged the story out but I feel that it does help in the transformation of the Caelum.

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What in your opinion is the true meaning of the title of this book? What is it that Caelum truly comes to believe? God? Himself? Love?

Pat W Coffey The experiences of life take us on journeys of discover.

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This question contains spoilers... (view spoiler)

Laura

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[I'm certain you no longer care about this, but I just finished the book and am feeling a bit nonplussed!. . .

-Mo, having carved a bit of a niche for herself in the world of jail, SUDDENLY HAS A BRAIN ANEURISM AND DROPS DEAD halfway through her sentence at a little reception being given for inmates doing well. I had thought surely she would kill herself or OD? No, she just dies randomly. Nothing happens with her father. The stepmother sends an icy condolence card.

-How it ends is that Caelum gives up fighting for the farm and moves to an apartment and becomes a teacher at the prison instead of at the community college. His tenants have divorced and moved away. There is a brief hint that he's reconnected with his childhood friends, but it isn't even a scene. It's just him walking into the room and seeing the other men as a surprise, and the scene switches. He remains close with Velvet.

-Velvet gets together with the older brother of the kid Mo accidentally killed, and is pregnant with his baby at the end. The idea is that she's "calmed down" and Caelum will be kind of a pseudo grandfather figure. She did finally talk about her massacre experience; she hid under a table and just shook her head at Dylan when confronted. When she didn't respond to the question about believing in God, I guess he spared her or lost interest in killing her? It's not an interesting revelation, meant as no disrespect to real people who survive shootings like that. It just felt that, in the novel, it was withheld for no reason.

-The dead babies were buried under the apple house by Ulysses and Caelum's dad, Alden. Ulysses essentially exposes their existence; he is the only living person who knew of them. Before the apple house location, the babies were actually in this weird nook in the attic? One of the babies is Caelum's half-brother by his mother (who is not the mother he knew, but a model with "issues" that Caelum's dad was actually in love with) and a man she'd been having an affair with pre-Caelum. She drank some kind of late term abortion concoction and made Alden come deliver the baby, and he hoarded it with the other baby, which he had known about since his childhood. I actually am not positive they revealed a FIRM identification of the older baby, but it seemed like it must have belonged to Lydia's sister Lillian (actually named Pansy and a child of Lizzy's husband's affair, sent to live with Lizzy out of complete lack of options because both parents had died), and the baby seemed to be the product of abuse by a weird man with an eyepatch that lived in the house as a kind of servant. I agree with you about the ancient backstories. I skimmed most of Lizzy's history because it was just simply so boring, and only barely connected to the characters I cared about!! I thought Caelum's real mother and how they worked all that out was FAR more interesting, and we got so little of her. (hide spoiler)]

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what was it about?

Pat W Coffey It is a view of one man's trials and tribulations and how they brought him to understand balance.…moreIt is a view of one man's trials and tribulations and how they brought him to understand balance.(less)

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Unanswered Questions (1)

I listened to the audio book but would like to see the list of reference books and notes he used, is there somewhere on line where this is available?

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