The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
Check the catalog for this item.
The Monsters of Templeton is a story, part historical, part mystery, based on the real town of Cooperstown, NY. Templeton is the town’s name in the novel but Groff tells you right upfront that she is using Cooperstown as her backdrop. Templeton has a sports museum (in Cooperstown the National Baseball Hall of Fame) and a legendary author, James Franklin Temple, who is based on James Fenimore Cooper.
Wilhelmina (Willie) Upton returns home from graduate school, pregnant, after a degrading relationship with her professor. Her mother, Vivienne (Vi) had returned to the family home the same way almost thirty years earlier. Willie, who has been told by her mother that her birth was the result of a relationship in her hippie days, learns that this is not true and that a prominent member of Templeton society is her real father. Vi refuses to tell her who it is. But with a few clues, Willie starts to dig up the family history of the famous families, including her own, in Templeton.
Some chapters are told from the viewpoint of the person Willie is researching at the time. Other chapters are exchanges of letters between two 19th century friends, exposing the secrets of life in that time. During all of this a “Loch Ness” type monster floats to the top of the lake–verifying the beliefs of many of the locals that there has always been a monster in their midst. The monster is a suitable metaphor for the secrets that unfold in this novel.