View a FREE sample

Good Neighbors

• The following version of this book was used to create this Lesson Plan: Franzen, Jonathan. Freedom. Fourth Estate, 2011.

• The novel began with the omniscient narrator remarking that news of Walter Berglund’s disgrace reached his former neighbors in Ramsey Hill—a neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota—via the New York Times.

• The narrator then went back in time to describe how Walter and Patty Berglund “were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier” (3).

• Patty Berglund, an athlete in high school and college, was one of the few stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood of Ramsey Hill.

• Patty was notorious for being unable to speak badly of anyone; she remembered everyone’s birthday “and came to your back door with a plate of...

(read more Chapter Abstracts)

This section contains 5,639 words (approx. 19 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample