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 Seventh Heaven:
1. Start with Noral Silk. What is it about her that, at first, the neighbors on Hemlock Street find so disturbing? Should Nora have tried a little harder to blend in with the residents, if only for Billy's sake? What, eventually, draws residents to Nora? What does she offer them?
2. What is Nora hoping to find or experience in her new life in the Long Island subdivision? What kind of lives are all the residents of this suburban world hoping to live? Are suburbs really the safe, insulated world their residents hope it will be?
3. What about Nora and 17-year-old Ace McCarthy? How do you feel about their relationship?
4. When Billy begins to practice his father's magic trick, is he really starting to look fainter or is that that others are simply ignoring him?
5. Hoffman shows us Hemlock Street, not just through Nora, but through the eyes of a number of residents. Talk about some of the other characters in the subdivision: Joe Hennessy (why does he find his role as detective troubling?); Donna Durgin (what prompts her diet and her abandonment of her family?); Danny and Rickie (what adolescent struggles are they going through?) What do these characters' stories reveal about life in a 1950's era subdivision?
6. The novel is set in the late 1950s, on the cusp of the '60s. Why might Hoffman have chosen that particular time for her story? What larger issue is she exploring? In what way were the '50s and '60s different from one another? (Think about Nora, for instance, and how she represents, thematically, a disruptive influence on a seemingly placid community.)
7. Hoffman makes use of magical realism, the incorporation of supernatural elements into otherwise realistic stories. She believes that we live in a magical world. How does she inject fantastic events and objects into this novel? Do you appreciate her fantasy or find it contrived?
8. By the end of the novel, how have characters changed? What, if anything, have they learned...or gained? Do you find the ending satisfying? Do you feel as if all the strings are tied neatly together...or are some things left open and unresolved?
8. Have you read other Alice Hoffman novels? How does this one compare?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page