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Characters |
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Sam Hart Clementine – celloist Holly and Ruby - daughters Pam – Clementine’s mother |
Erika Oliver Sylvia – Erika’s mother, hoarder |
Vid Tiffany – former stripper Dakota |
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Harry – cranky neighbor, died alone, found by Oliver
and Tiffany Steve Lunt – Harry’s great-nephew Andrew – parent at Saint Anastasias who knew Tiffany
in her previous life Gave Tiffany large amount of money for sex which
provided the financial basis for her real estate business |
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For
Discussion:
NOTE: Page
numbers are from hardback edition.
1. Discuss the problem of hoarding. Erika felt that “every piece of junk
represented a choice her mother had made of an object over Erika” (page
165). Should, or could, Erika have been
more understanding?
2. Was it fair of Pam to ask Clementine
to be Erika’s friend? Should she have
seen eventually how this bothered Clementine and allowed her to pull back?
3. Why was Erika stealing things from
Clementine?
4. How much did Erika affect
Clementine? Toward the end of the novel
Clementine wondered “if her entire personality was a fabrication, nothing more
than a response to Erika’s personality.
You are like this, so therefore I am like that” (page
336).
5. What would Clementine’s life have
been like without Erika? Clementine compared
Erika to her cello’s wolf tone and the effect of the eliminator, and wondered
if her life “would have lacked something subtle but essential without her
[Erika] in it; a certain richness, a certain depth” (page 342).
6. Could you understand Sylvia’s feelings
about Pam, especially when she learned that Clementine might donate her eggs to
Erika? She thought “My grandchild will
be Pam’s grandchild. It’s not enough
that she has to take my daughter, oh no, now she can lord it over me with this”
(page 319). Should she have been more
grateful to Pam?
7. Was Ruby falling into the fountain
and almost drowning “bad luck” as Clementine said or “negligence” as Sam
recounted (page 249)?
8. On the night of the accident, Holly
told Oliver and then Pam that she had pushed Ruby. Oliver told her to whisper she was sorry to
Ruby and Pam told her that she really didn’t push her and to put it out of her
mind. Were these the best ways to
handle the situation?
9. Dakota felt guilty about what
happened because she went inside to read when she was bored playing with Holly
and Ruby. Are her feelings
understandable? Should her parents have
realized this earlier and intervened?
10. What did you think about the
revelation that Tiffany had been a stripper and the pretend lap dance she
performed at the barbeque? Why did any
of the adults think that was an appropriate thing to do? If that event had not happened, would the
next event of Rudy falling into the fountain have happened?
11. What did the substory of Harry add to
the novel?
12. In the last chapter, Clementine is
starting to feel that Erika is distancing herself. Then, on the last page, she wonders “what
sort of person Erika could have been, would have been, should have been,
if she’d been given the privilege of an ordinary home. You can jump so much
higher when you have somewhere safe to fall” (page 415). How might Erika have been different if she
had grown up in a more normal environment?
13. As you were reading, what did you
think happened at the barbeque? Were
you tempted to look ahead to find out what had happened?
14. Did you like the way the story was
written, with the event a mystery? How
would the book have been different if the reader had known what happened from
the beginning?
15. If you read the book again for this
discussion, how was your reading experience given that you knew from the
beginning what had happened?
