From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home, a dazzling new novel hailed as an “instantly addictive…tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.” (Booklist) 
 
After surviving a horrific shooting at her high school, fifteen-year-old Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, in California. Art, not much more than a child himself, doesn’t quite understand how or why he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen—and probably deeply damaged—adolescent girl. And although Linnea has little interest in her father, she becomes fascinated by the eccentric cast of characters surrounding him: Conner, a local handyman whose own home life is a war zone, and Christie, her neighbor, who has just been given the reins to a bizarrely named charity fund, the Humanity Project. As the Fund gains traction and Linnea begins to heal, the Humanity Project begs the question: Can you indeed pay someone to be good? At what price?

Thompson proves herself at the height of her powers in The Humanity Project, crafting emotionally suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining characters, in which we inevitably see ourselves. Set against the backdrop of current events and cultural calamity, it is at once a multifaceted ensemble drama and a deftly observant story of our twenty-first-century society.
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2013: When a school shooting sends a damaged teen named Linnea to live with her lazy, pot-smoking father in California, she becomes immersed in a world in which everyone nurses a deep sense of economic doom and financial hopelessness. “Times were bad for everybody, everybody had it coming” writes Thompson, and this: “The world was one big goddam banana peel, waiting for you to slip on it.” One character feels like “they’d changed the rules when he wasn’t looking and drained all the good luck out of the world.” These sympathetic and recognizable people–“the overeducated and the underemployed”–lose their homes to Bank of America; suffer due to a lack of health insurance; shamble through dull, low-paying jobs; tame their sorrows with weed, Percocet, and booze as they bemoan their “shitcan” lives, their “getting-by” lives, their “waiting for the next kick in the head” lives. At times, The Humanity Project reads like the love child of Dickens and Barbara Ehrenreich. And yet, remarkably, Thompson makes us care, gives us hope, showing us that the whimsy of a few good-hearted people can inspire others to strive to become their better selves. A father can help his daughter; a son can help his father. And, while bad things can and do happen to decent (if flawed) people, the decent can fight back. –Neal Thompson