| Ready for this month’s Thread Mystery Character? Let’s go!
This character is discovered on a famously epic quest and they are fierce and frightening at first glance, leaping out to confront intruders.
But when the brave protagonist in this book challenges this character, their true nature is quickly unmasked.
This character confesses to the travelers that the character puts on a good show because that’s what’s expected of them but that it conceals the truth. And yet when the ultimate test arrives in a number of brave deeds, this character will meet the moment.
The person who created this character grew up in the east but found their way to the barren, windswept plains of South Dakota, where they began the story that would make their fortune. The book that emerged from this person’s mid-life career change created a new genre and made this writer a household name.
Can you name the character, the book in which the character appeared and the person who wrote that book?
When you have the answer, email Kerri at kmiller@mpr.org. Or watch for the answer in next week’s Thread newsletter. Big Books, Bold Ideas is asking a series of writers to reflect on how they see America and its democracy in this fractious, tumultuous moment to take the broader view of who we are in this time of disharmony and disunity.
Eboo Patel, who founded the country’s largest interfaith organization in Chicago, believes we Americans are in urgent need of a new guiding principle for our changing democracy.
He writes in his 2022 book, “We Need to Build,” that a fresh manifesto for a new era in America could sound like this: “We the varied peoples of a nation struggling to be reborn are defeating the things we don’t like by building the things we do.”
One of Patel’s remedies for our divisiveness is a recommitment to civic spaces and conversations and the rise of new civic leaders to guide us. He writes: “The institutions that nurture pluralism do not fall from the sky or rise from the ground. People build them.”
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 