Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Little Bird of Heaven:
1. With whose narrative voice in the novel, Krista's or Aaron's, do you most sympathasize? Is one more trustworthy than the other?
2. Why is Krista so supported of, enamored with her father—and so certain he is not the killer of Zoe?
3. Did you at one time suspect one of the fathers over the other, say, Eddie over Delray, or vice versa? When the murder is finally found, were you suprised?
4. But the story is not really about the murder, or even solving it. The point of the story is the stain of sin and violence that befalls the children of Eddie and Zoe. In a sense, Krista and Aaron are almost as much victims as Zoe was. In what ways are the two shaped by the murder; how does the tragedy come to define their lives? How might Aaron's life, for instance, have been different had his mother lived?
5. What underlies the passion, or compulsion, that propels the two young people together, even if only briefly?
6. What finally makes Krista realize, at the end, that even though their attraction is as powerful as ever, she realizes she cannot be with him?
7. In this, as in many of her works, Oates is concerned with the relationship of passion and violence. How does that play out in Little Bird of Heaven?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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