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Summary  |  Author  |  Book Reviews  |  Discussion Questions

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House of Daughters
Sarah-Kate Lynch, 2008
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452289383

In Brief 
With effervescent wit and clear-eyed insight, Sarah-Kate Lynch explores the rivalries and bonds of sisterhood amidst the lush countryside of France's Champagne province. Clementine is the rightful heir to the House of Peine, the vineyard that has been in the family for generations.

She has spent her whole life caring for the vines, not to mention caring for her sour brute of a father. But now that the Peine patriarch is dead, his will stipulates that Clementine must share the vineyard with a half-sister she hasn't seen in twenty years and another she didn't even know existed. As one vineyard brings three estranged siblings together, readers will savor this heartfelt toast to sisterhood and inspired celebration of Champagne. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author 
A tireless researcher, Sarah-Kate Lynch trailed the byways of Ireland sampling dairy products for her first novel, Blessed Are the Cheesemakers, and perfected French sourdough bread for her second, By Bread Alone. In the interests of maintaining her artistic integrity regarding House of Daughters, she considers it her duty to drink as much champagne as she can possibly manage. (From the publisher.)

More
Sarah-Kate Lynch is quite a cranky journalist of several decades who prefers making things up to recording them accurately. This is not very good if you are a journalist, which may explain (a) the crankiness and (b) why she now writes novels.

She also writes two columns in the New Zealand Woman's Weekly, New Zealand's best-read magazine. One is about nothing and the other is about books.

Sarah-Kate lives in a cliff top house on the wild west coast of New Zealand's North Island and is currently very glad she has not bothered to amass a fortune thereby saving herself the angst of having it halved.

She is also glad she lives on a cliff top because what with global warming and all, she could be underwater as well as poor.

As it is she lives very happily with a lovely dog called Ginger and a husband called Ted. Oh, hang on, no, that's not right. The dog is called Ted and the husband is Ginger. (From the author's website.)

Extras
From a 2008 interview with her publisher, Penguin Group:

Q: What inspired you to write House of Daughters?

I decided one year, due to being old and getting terrible hangovers from drinking still white wine, that I would only drink champagne for a year because it was too expensive to ever afford much of, thereby only ever theoretically coming in small amounts. This proved to be a slightly flawed idea, as it turns out, because I simply set my research skills to finding how to get it cheaper. During this process, I discovered what it was that made champagne pricey in the first place: it all comes from a very small part of France and is made to a very strict recipe handed down from one generation to the next.

Well, that was very much up my alley, and when I found out that champagne is made from three different grapes all blended together in different amounts each year to get the exact same taste, the story of three different sisters having to work together for the good of something bigger than themselves started to fall into place. I have two sisters and we get along very well, I couldn’t imagine not having them, or falling out with them. We’re like grapes, we come in a bunch.

Q: How did you go about doing research for House of Daughters?

I went straight to Champagne! I’ve been a food writer in the past so had contacts that got me in the door at Veuve Clicquot, Moet and Chandon, and Krug. Lunch with Remi Krug in Reims was a highlight – as was driving with him! Those were the big name champagne brands that have astonishing PR arms but I probably learned more in terms of what I would base the house of Peine on from the Tarlant family near Epernay, where I stayed for a bit, and where they grow their own grapes and where four generations of the family meet once a year to decide on the blend. One of my proudest moments was when the Tarlants wrote to me and asked if they could sell the UK version of the House of Daughters from their winery...and they sent it to customers as a Christmas present.

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Critics Say . . . 
(There don't seem to be any mainstream press reviews online for this novel. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for their customer reviews.)

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Book Club Discussion Questions 

1. The three sisters in this novel are very different. Do you see any similarities?

2. How are you different from, or like, your siblings? Do your differences and similarities draw you closer to your siblings?

3. The relationship between sisters has long been a subject of fascination in literature. Why do you think readers are so interested in sisters?

4. Clementine's father is a difficult man at the beginning of the novel. Did you find him more sympathetic by the end of the novel?

5. Which sister did you relate to the most? Why?

6. How important was the setting in the novel to you? Did it enrich or limit your experience of the story in any ways? Could you imagine this story set in a different environment?

7. Which essential part of champagne-making reflects the relationship between the sisters?

8. Sarah-Kate Lynch chose the names of her characters deliberately. Each sister is named after a quality she does not have at the beginning of the novel, but has been recognized for at the end. Can you pick those three qualities?

10. How important is a name in shaping a person’s character in real life? How does a character’s name influence your impressions of the character?

11. The novel is set in France and written as though perhaps translated from French. Did you use the glossary to translate the French words? Did you find the French words distracting or endearing?

12. Did the novel inspire you to learn more about champagne and the process of making champagne? Was that an integral part of the reading experience for you? Have you been to a champagne vineyard?

13. The three sisters all fall for Hector. Did you believe they were all in love with him? Why do you think each sister needed Hector’s attentions at that particular moment in their lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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One Day 
David Nicholls, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307474711

Summary 
It's 1988 and Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley have only just met. They both know that the next day, after college graduation, they must go their separate ways. But after only one day together, they cannot stop thinking about one another. As the years go by, Dex and Em begin to lead separate lives—lives very different from the people they once dreamed they'd become. And yet, unable to let go of that special something that grabbed onto them that first night, an extraordinary relationship develops between the two.

Over twenty years, snapshots of that relationship are revealed on the same day—July 15th—of each year. Dex and Em face squabbles and fights, hopes and missed opportunities, laughter and tears. And as the true meaning of this one crucial day is revealed, they must come to grips with the nature of love and life itself. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—November 30, 1966
• Where—Hampshire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Bristol University; American Musical and Dramatic Academy
• Currently—lives in London, England

David Nicholls is an English novelist and screenwriter. His novels include Starter for Ten (2003), The Understudy (2005), One Day (2009), and Us (2014).

Early years
He attended Barton Peveril sixth-form college at Eastleigh, Hampshire, from 1983 to 1985 (taking A-levels in drama and theatre studies—like his elder and younger siblings—English, physics and biology), and playing a wide range of roles in college drama productions.

He then attended Bristol University in the 1980s (graduating with a BA in Drama and English in 1988) before training as an actor at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. Throughout his twenties, he worked as a professional actor, using the stage name David Holdaway. He played small roles at various theatres, including the West Yorkshire Playhouse and, for a three year period, at the Royal National Theatre.

Screenwriter
As a screenwriter, he co-wrote the adapted screenplay of Simpatico and contributed four scripts to the third series of Cold Feet (both 2000). For the latter, he was nominated for a British Academy Television Craft Award for Best New Writer (Fiction). He created the Granada Television pilot and miniseries I Saw You (2000, 2002) and the Tiger Aspect six-part series Rescue Me (2002). Rescue Me lasted for only one series before being cancelled. Nicholls had written four episodes for the second series before being told of the cancellation. His anger over this led to him taking a break from screenwriting to concentrate on writing his first novel, Starter for Ten. When he returned to screenwriting, he adapted Much Ado About Nothing into a one-hour segment of the BBC's 2005 ShakespeaRe-Told season.

In 2006, his film adaptation Starter for 10 was released in cinemas. The following year, he wrote And When Did You Last See Your Father?, an adaptation of the memoir by Blake Morrison. He penned an adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles for the BBC, which aired in 2008, and an adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd for BBC Films. He has also adapted Great Expectations; the screenplay has been listed on the 2009 Brit List, an annual industry poll of the best unmade scripts outside of the United States.

In 2005 he wrote Aftersun for the Old Vic's 24-Hour Play festival and later developed it into a one-off comedy for BBC One, broadcast in 2006. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
A wonderful, wonderful book: wise, funny, perceptive, compassionate and often unbearably sad ... the best British social novel since Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! ... Nicholls’s witty prose has a transparency that brings Nick Hornby to mind: it melts as you read it so that you don’t notice all the hard work that it’s doing.
London Times

With a nod to When Harry Met Sally, this funny, emotionally engaging third novel from David Nicholls traces the unlikely relationship between Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew.... Told with toe-curlingly accurate insight and touching observation.... If you left college sometime in the eighties with no clear idea of what was going to happen next, or who your lifelong friends might turn out to be, this one’s a definite for your holiday suitcase. If you didn’t, it still is.... The feel good film must surely be just around the corner. I can’t wait.
Daily Mail (UK)

Just as Nicholls has made full use of his central concept, so he has drawn on all his comic and literary gifts to produce a novel that is not only roaringly funny but also memorable, moving and, in its own unassuming, unpretentious way, rather profound.
Guardian (UK)

Nicholls captures superbly the ennui of post graduation.... The writing is almost faultless, there’s a great feeling for the period and it’s eminently readable.
London Herald

Will Dex and Emma get together before it's too late? Will they ever act on the lone un-self-conscious thought Emma has been able to hold in her head since the day she walked away from Dexter, when she was 22 and he was 23, as his parents drove him home from college into his still unblemished future? "Love and be loved," she had told herself, "if you ever get the chance." It's something you may want to find out this summer at poolside. And if you do, you may want to take care where you lay this book down. You may not be the only one who wants in on the answers.
Lisa Schillinger - New York Times

The Hollywood-ready latest from Nicholls (The Understudy) makes a brief pit stop in book form before its inevitable film adaptation (in 2011). The episodic story takes place during a single day each year for two decades in the lives of Dex and Em. Dexter, the louche public school boy, and Emma, the brainy Yorkshire lass, meet the day they graduate from college in 1988 and run circles around one another for the next 20 years. Dex becomes a TV presenter whose life of sex, booze, and drugs spins out of control, while Em dully slogs her way through awful jobs before becoming the author of young adult books. They each take other lovers and spouses, but they cannot really live without each other. Nicholls is a glib, clever writer, and while the formulaic feel and maudlin ending aren't ideal for a book, they'll play in the multiplex.
Publishers Weekly

Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew get together (almost) following their graduation in 1988. We catch up with them annually on July 15, St. Swithin's Day, the British equivalent of Groundhog Day but with rain. Here, it's a prognosticator of how their lives are turning out. She's been in love with Dex for years, while he's been in bed with more women than we can count. He gets a job in "media" as a late-night TV presenter on music/rock star interview shows. She works at a crappy Mexican restaurant before altering course and becoming a teacher. Do they eventually find their way back to each other? Nicholls (The Understudy) doesn't take the easy route, throwing lots of relationships and obstacles in our protagonists' paths. Verdict: This tale of youthful dreams coming true and perhaps not being so dreamy is written with great verve and charm, reminiscent of the works of Mike Gayle. A coming-of-age story for all of us who might still be wondering what we want to be when we grow up. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal

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Discussion Questions 
1. To what extent do Emma’s thoughts and assumptions about Dexter [pp. 5-6] and Dexter’s sketch of Emma  [pp. 8-9] rely on facile stereotypes they each harbor?  In what ways do they embody more measured reflections? How accurate are their assessments? Does their initial encounter make the reader more sympathetic to one of the characters? In what ways might the reader’s gender, experiences, and prejudices affect their feelings about Emma and Dexter?

2. What determines the path Emma follows in her post-university years? In addition to being a wonderfully comic interlude, how does her stint with Sledgehammer Theater Cooperative enrich the portrait of the time in which the novel is set? Is Emma’s explanation of why she ended up working at the tacky Mexican restaurant—“there was a recession on and people were clinging to their jobs.... the government had ended student grants” [p. 56]—honest? Have circumstances and “the city defeated her” or is she responsible for her own plight?

3. In his unsent letter Dexter writes, “I think you’re scared of being happy.... that you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it’s easier....”[p. 42]. How do Dexter’s insights into Emma compare to her own? Is he more perceptive about her than he is about himself? Does Emma underestimate her talents and potential? Despite its carefree tone, does Dexter’s letter betray certain doubts or misgivings about himself?

4. Does Dexter’s meteoric rise in television change the fundamental dynamics between Dexter and Emma? What aspects of their relationship remain unchanged? What influences the things they say and, perhaps more importantly, what they don’t say, during their afternoon on Primrose Hill [p. 60-72]? Were you surprised to find them vacationing together in Greece the following year? Who is more aware of—and affected by—the sexual tensions and temptations they both experience?

5. Is Dexter’s idle vision of his future [p. 9] realized during “the late twenties” (chapters six through nine)?  In what ways is the actuality of his life an ironic comment on his expectations? Does he act in ways that undermine his happiness?  Discuss, for example, his visit to his parents [pp. 120-135]; his humiliating debut on Late-Night Lock-In [pp. 176-7]; his hostile, crude manner at dinner with Emma [pp. 205-210]; and his glib excuses and rationalizations for his actions [p.190]. What glimpses are there of his more vulnerable side? Do they make him a more appealing character?

6. “At twenty-seven, Emma wonders if she is getting old” [p. 115]. Do Emma’s feelings about both the satisfactions and regrets that come with being “grown-up” ring true? What explains Emma’s relationship with Ian? Is she willingly deceiving herself (and Ian)? Despite her impatience with him and his desperately unfunny comedy routines, does she have genuine feelings for Ian?

7. At the disastrous dinner on July 15, 1995, Emma declares, “Dexter, I love you so much... and I probably always will. I just don’t like you any more. I’m sorry” [p. 210]. Does Dexter recognize why his behavior leads to this break? Does he care? Could the dinner have ended differently?

8. Compare Dexter’s reaction to his agent’s report on how he is perceived [pp. 240, 243] and Emma’s reaction to her unsuccessful interview with a publishing executive [p. 245]. What do they reveal how each of them approaches life’s ups-and-downs?

9. “Now that she was actually involved in an affair—its paraphernalia of secret looks, hands held under tables, fondles in the stationery cupboard—she was surprised at how familiar it all was, and what a potent emotion lust could be, when combined with guilt and self-loathing” [p. 221]. What does the affair with Mr. Godalming reflect about Emma’s state of mind as she approaches her mid-thirties? What satisfaction does it give her? To what extent is she influenced by the romantic notions and expectations society imposes on unmarried women?

10. When he meets Sylvie Cope, Dexter thinks, “And yet, despite all this, the downturn in professional fortunes, he is fine now, because he has fallen in love with Sylvie, beautiful Sylvie....” [p. 251]. In what ways does the affair open Dexter’s eyes to new possibilities and a different way of life? What flaws in their relationship does he fail to grasp fully and why?  What consequences does this have on the course of their marriage?

11. What is the significance of the wedding Dexter and Emma attend [p. 269-296]? What do they learn about themselves and each other that surprises, pleases, or unsettles them? What do their conversations [pp. 286, 290, 293, for example] represent in terms of their personal development as well as the evolution of their friendship?

12. What does the rendezvous in Paris share with Emma and Dexter’s trip to Greece nine years earlier? What impact does Emma’s success as an author and Dexter’s failed marriage have on the “balance of power” between them? Discuss the factors—including age, their individual circumstances, and the length of their friendship—that contribute to their willingness to be more honest and open with each other.

13. Do Emma’s musings about where life has taken her [p. 381] resonate with you? What do Emma and Dexter at forty have in common with the people they were on graduation night? How does Nicholls simultaneously capture the ways people change and the persistence of individual characteristics through the passage of time?

14. What demands does the unusual structure of One Day make on the reader? Discuss how the yearlong gaps between chapters; the focus on sometimes-mundane happenings rather than “big” events; and the alternation between Dexter’s and Emma’s journeys within each section increase your curiosity and engagement with the novel.

15. Callum is casually mentioned as mutual friend in Chapter 2 [p. 21] and chapter 6 [p. 109] and Ian makes his first appearance simply as Emma’s co-worker in Chapter 3 [p. 37]; both will become significant figures.  What other secondary characters become more important than the protagonists—and the reader—anticipate? What do these “surprises” reflect about the way lives unfold?

16. What does One Day share with traditional boy-meets-girl stories you are familiar with from books or movies? What does it suggest about the relationship between love and happiness?

17. How well does the novel capture society and culture over the twenty-year period? What specific details (references to books, television programs, political events, etc.) help bring the different periods to life? In what ways do the characters embody the qualities, good and bad, of their generation?

18. Throughout the novel, Dexter and Emma withhold or suppress their feeling for one another. Is one of them more guilty of this and, if so, why? What role does fate (e.g. Dexter’s unsent letter, missed phone calls, etc.), along with the characters’ assumptions and misinterpretations, play in the plot? The final section of the novel is introduced with a quote from Tess of the D’Ubervilles and in the acknowledgments [p. 437] Nicholls says, “A debt is owed to Thomas Hardy.” If you are familiar with Tess or Hardy’s other novels, discuss how his works might have influenced Nicholls in writing One Day.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Snow Falling on Cedars 
David Gutersonn, 1994
Knopf Doubleday
460 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679764021


Summary 
Winner of the 1995 Pen/Faulkner Award

In 1954 a fisherman from San Piedro Island in Puget Sound is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese-American is charged with his murder. The trial is haunted by memories of what happened to the Japanese residents during World War II when the entire community was sent into exile.

Snow Falling on Cedars is a beautifully crafted courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, illuminating the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—May 4, 1956
• Where—Seattle, Washington, USA
• Education—M.A., University of Washington
• Awards—Pen/Faulkner Award, 1995
• Currently—lives on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound,
   Washington

David Guterson is the author of a collection of short stories, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind; Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense; Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association Award, and was an international bestseller; and the national bestseller East of the Mountains.

More
Like many great writers before him, David Guterson draws on the rich local culture of the Pacific Northwest for inspiration in creating unforgettable characters and settings. Guterson credits many influences on his writing, beginning with his father, Murray Guterson, a distinguished criminal defense lawyer: His father's example taught him first and foremost to choose a career he would love, which also meant making positive contributions to the world.

Guterson was intrigued by the narrative of his father's cases. He often sat in on trials, but never felt the urge to become an attorney. When he started college, after one week in a creative writing class, he decided to become a writer. He eventually studied under Charles Johnson (author of Middle Passage), developing his ideas about the moral function of literature and concluded that it is the obligation of writers to present moral questions for reflection.

As Guterson honed his skills as a writer, he sought a variety of jobs that would afford him the time to practice his craft. He narrowed it down to firefighter or English teacher, and chose to become a teacher, mainly because he wanted to surround himself with books and writers on a daily basis. He moved to Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, teaching English at the local high school and freelancing as a journalist for Sports Illustrated and Harper's magazine.

During his years as an English teacher, Guterson discovered another one of his life's great influences. Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird became his favorite book, using the structure as a basis for Snow Falling on Cedars and asking many of the same moral questions. He says of Harper Lee's only book, "No other book had such an enormous impact. I read it 20 times in 10 years and it never got old, only richer, deeper and more interesting."

Guterson's first published works were short stories, mostly about young men poised on the edge of manhood, set in the Pacific Northwest. The stories were eventually published under the title The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind in 1989.

Finally, after ten years of researching and writing, Guterson's first novel was released in1995. Snow Falling on Cedars is the story of a tranquil town of fishermen and strawberry farmers, captivated by the murder a local man and the resulting trial of his lifelong friend. But the novel is more than a historical novel about the internment of Japanese-Americans or an inter-racial love story. Ultimately, the narrative seeks to ask the most basic of questions. That is, in a universe so indifferent to our fate, what is the best way to endure? Readers and critics responded, and the novel won a string of awards, including a Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers distinction and the 1995 Pen/Faulkner award.

Guterson's sophomore release in 1998 may have had some large shoes to fill, but the beautifully written East of the Mountains treated readers to a story of rebirth, set in the lush apple orchards of the Pacific Northwest. The novel details the final journey of a dying man's determination to end his life on his own terms, and contains Guterson's signature style of lustrous, emotional prose.

Fans of Guterson had to wait five more years for the 2003 release of Our Lady of the Forest, but readers and critics agree it was worth the wait. Guterson allows his characters to be all-to-human in this story of a young runaway who develops a following of believers after she reports seeing the Virgin Mary in the forest. His characters lust, fail and do the wrong thing, and even the landscape is imperfect in this suspenseful tale of what happens when one's faith is called into question. Classic Guterson.

Extras
• When he won the 1995 Pen/Faulkner award for Snow Falling on Cedars, Guterson quickly recognized the reclusive Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird for his success. He wrote to Lee asking her to come to the award ceremony in Washington, D.C., but being a highly private woman, she didn't attend.

• Snow Falling on Cedars was adapted for a 1999 film of the same title, directed by Scott Hicks and starring Ethan Hawke. The movie received an Academy Award nomination for cinematography. (From Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews 
Though the courtroom setting defines the present in Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's finely wrought and flawlessly written first novel (he is the author of a book of short stories and a guide to home schooling), this meticulously drawn legal drama forms only the topmost layer of complex time strata, which Mr. Guterson proceeds to mine assiduously through an intricate series of flashbacks. Thus testimony slides ineluctably from merely verbal recollection into remembered incident into fully realized historical narrative—past events told from the numerous characters' points of view with all the detail and intensity of lives being lived before our very eyes.
Susan Kenney - The New York Times

Luminous... a beautifully assured and full-bodied novel [that] becomes a tender examination of fairness and forgiveness... Guterson has fashioned something haunting and true.
Time

Japanese American Kabuo Miyomoto is arrested in 1954 for the murder of a fellow fisherman, Carl Heine. Miyomoto's trial, which provides a focal point to the novel, stirs memories of past relationships and events in the minds and hearts of the San Piedro Islanders. Through these memories, Guterson illuminates the grief of loss, the sting of prejudice triggered by World War II, and the imperatives of conscience. With mesmerizing clarity he conveys the voices of Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, and Ishmael Chambers, Hatsue's first love who, having suffered the loss of her love and the ravages of war, ages into a cynical journalist now covering Kabuo's trial. The novel poetically evokes the beauty of the land while revealing the harshness of war, the nuances of our legal system, and the injustice done to those interned in U.S. relocation camps. Highly recommended for all fiction collections. —Sheila Riley, Smith- sonian Inst. Libs., Washington, D.C.
Library Journal

A 1954 murder trial in an island community off the coast of Washington state broadens into an exploration of war, race, and the mysteries of human motivation.... Guterson's first novel is compellingly suspenseful on each of its several levels. —Dennis Dodge
Booklist

Old passions, prejudices, and grudges surface in a Washington State island town when a Japanese man stands trial for the murder of a fisherman in the 1950s. Guterson (The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, 1989, etc.) has written a thoughtful, poetic first novel, a cleverly constructed courtroom drama with detailed, compelling characters. Many years earlier, Kabuo Miyamoto's family had made all but the last payment on seven acres of land they were in the process of buying from the Heine family. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Kabuo's family was interned. Etta Heine, Carl's mother, called off the deal. Kabuo served in the war, returned, and wanted his land back. After changing hands a few times, the land ended up with Carl Heine. When Carl, a fisherman, is found drowned in his own net, all the circumstantial evidence, with the land dispute as a possible motive, points to Kabuo as the murderer. Meanwhile, Hatsue Miyamoto, Kabuo's wife, is the undying passion of Ishmael Chambers, the publisher and editor of the town newspaper. Ishmael, who returned from the war minus an arm, can't shake his obsession for Hatsue any more than he can ignore the ghost pains in his nonexistent arm. As a thick snowstorm whirls outside the courtroom, the story is unburied. The same incidents are recounted a number of times, with each telling revealing new facts. In the end, justice and morality are proven to be intimately woven with beauty—the kind of awe and wonder that children feel for the world. But Guterson communicates these truths through detail, not philosophical argument: Readers will come away with a surprising store of knowledge regarding gill-netting boats and other specifics of life in the Pacific Northwest. Packed with lovely moments and as compact as haiku—at the same time, a page-turner full of twists.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. Snow Falling on Cedars opens in the middle of Kabuo Miyamoto's trial. It will be pages before we learn the crime of which he has been accused or the nature of the evidence against him. What effect does the author create by withholding this information and introducing it in the form of flashbacks? Where else in the narrative are critical revelations postponed? How is this novel's past related to its fictional present?

2. The trial functions both as this novel's narrative frame and as its governing metaphor. As we follow it, we are compelled to ask larger questions about the nature of truth, guilt, and responsibility. How does the author interweave these two functions? Which characters are aware that what is at stake is more than one man's guilt?

3. When the trial begins, San Piedro is in the midst of a snowstorm, which continues throughout its course. What role does snow play—both literally and metaphorically—in the book? Pay particular attention to the way in which snow blurs, freezes, isolates, and immobilizes, even as it holds out the promise of an "impossible winter purity" [p. 8]. How does nature shape this novel?

4. Guterson divides his island setting into four zones: the town of Amity Harbor; the sea; the strawberry fields; and the cedar forest. What actions take place in these different zones? Which characters are associated with them? How does the author establish a different mood for each setting?

5. In his first description of Carl Heine [pp. 14-16], Guterson imparts a fair amount of what is seemingly background information: We learn about his mother's sale of the family strawberry farm; about Carl's naval service in World War II; and about his reticence. We learn that Carl is considered "a good man." How do these facts become crucial later on, as mechanisms of plot, as revelations of the dead man's character, and as clues to San Piedro's collective mores? Where else does the author impart critical information in a casual manner, often "camouflaging" it amid material that will turn out to have no further significance? What does this method suggest about the novel's sense of the meaningful—about the value it assigns to things that might be considered random or irrelevant?

6. When Carl's body is dredged from the water, the sheriff has to remind himself that what he is seeing is a human being. While performing the autopsy, however, Horace Whaley forces himself to think of Carl as "the deceased... a bag of guts, a sack of parts" [p. 54]. Where else in Snow Falling on Cedars are people depersonalized—detached from their identities—either deliberately or inadvertently? What role does depersonalization play within the novel's larger scheme?

7. What material evidence does the prosecution produce in arguing Kabuo's guilt? Did these bits of information immediately provoke the investigators' suspicions, or only reinforce their preexisting misgivings about Carl's death? Why might they have been so quick to attribute Carl's death to foul play? How does the entire notion of a murder trial—in which facts are interpreted differently by opposing attorneys—fit into this book's thematic structure?

8. Ishmael suffers from feelings of ambivalence about his home and a cold-blooded detachment from his neighbors. Are we meant to attribute these to the loss of his arm or to other events in his past? How is Ishmael's sense of estrangement mirrored in Hatsue, who as a teenager rebels against her mother's values and at one point declares, "I don't want to be Japanese" [p. 201]? To what extent do Kabuo and Carl suffer from similar feelings? How does this condition of transcendental homelessness serve both to unite and to isolate the novel's characters?

9. What significance do you ascribe to Ishmael's name? What does Guterson's protagonist have in common with the narrator of Moby-Dick, another story of the sea?

10. What role has the San Piedro Review played in the life and times of its community? How has Ishmael's stewardship of the paper differed from his father's? In what ways does he resemble his father—of whom his widow says, "He loved humankind dearly and with all his heart, but he disliked most human beings" [p. 36]? What actions of Ishmael's may be said to parallel the older man's?

11. Ishmael's experience in World War II has cost him an arm. In that same war Horace Whaley, the county coroner, lost his sense of effectiveness, when so many of the men he was supposed to care for died. How has the war affected other characters in this book, both those who served and those who stayed home?

12. Guterson tells us that "on San Piedro the silent-toiling, autonomous gill-netter became the collective image of the good man" [p. 38]. Thus, Carl's death comes to signify the death of the island's ideal citizen: he represents a delayed casualty of the war in which so many other fine young men were killed. Yet how productive does the ideal of silent individualism turn out to be? To what extent is Carl a casualty of his self-sufficiency? What other characters in this novel adhere to a code of solitude?

13. Kabuo and Hatsue also possess—and are at times driven by—certain values. As a young girl, Hatsue is taught the importance of cultivating stillness and composure in order "to seek union with the Greater Life" [p. 83]. Kabuo's father imparts to him the martial codes of his ancestors. How do these values determine their behavior, and particularly their responses to internment, war, and imprisonment? How do they clash with the values of the Anglo community, even as they sometimes resemble them?

14. Racism is a persistent theme in this novel. It is responsible for the internment of Kabuo, Hatsue, and their families, for Kabuo's loss of his land, and perhaps for his indictment for murder. In what ways do the book's Japanese characters respond to the hostility of their white neighbors? How does bigotry manifest itself in the thoughts and behavior of characters like Etta Heine—whose racism is keenly ironic in view of her German origins—Art Moran, and Ishmael himself? Are we meant to see these characters as typical of their place and time?

15. Although almost all the novel's white characters are guilty of racism, only one of them—Etta Heine—emerges unsympathetically. How do her values and motives differ from those of other San Piedrans? How is her hostility to the Japanese related to her distaste for farming? To what extent are Guterson's characters defined by their feelings for their natural environment?

16. Ishmael's adolescent romance with Hatsue has been the defining fact of his life, its loss even more wounding than the loss of his arm. Yet when Hatsue first remembers Ishmael, it is only as a "boy" [p. 86] and her recollection of their first kiss is immediately supplanted by the memory of her wedding night with Kabuo. How else does Guterson contrast Hatsue's feelings for these two men? (Note that Hatsue's feelings for both Ishmael and her husband become clear in the course of making love.) What does the disparity between Hatsue's memories and Ishmael's suggest about the nature of love? Where else in this novel do different characters perceive the same events in radically different ways—and with what consequences?

17. In choosing Kabuo, Hatsue acknowledges "the truth of her private nature" [p. 89]. That choice implies a paradox. For, if Kabuo is a fellow nisei, he is also rooted in the American earth of San Piedro's strawberry fields. How is this doubleness—between Japanese and American—expressed elsewhere in Snow Falling on Cedars?

18. Ishmael's attraction to Hatsue is closely connected to a yearning for transcendence, as indicated by their early conversation about the ocean. Ishmael says, "It goes forever, " while Hatsue insists, "It ends somewhere" [p. 97]. Typically, it is Ishmael who wishes to dissolve boundaries, Hatsue who keeps reasserting them, as when she gently withholds the embrace that Ishmael so desperately wants. What limits might Ishmael wish to transcend, even as a boy? Does he ever manage to do so? Does Snow Falling on Cedars hold the promise of transcendence for its characters or at best offer them a reconciliation with their limits?

19. One way that Guterson interweaves his novel's multiple narrative strands is through the use of parallelism: Ishmael spies on Hatsue; so does Kabuo. The two men are similarly haunted by memories of the war. Both Kabuo and Carl Heine turn out to be dissatisfied fishermen who yearn to return to farming. Where else in this novel does the author employ this method, and to what effect?

20. What is the significance of the novel's last sentence: "Accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart"?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward, 2011
Bloomsbury USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781608196265


Summary
Winner, 2011 National Book Award

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else.

Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.

As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day.

A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1977
• Where—DeLisle, Mississippi, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., University of Michigan
• Awards—2 National Book Awards (others below)
• Currently—lives in Mississippi; commutes to Mobile, Alabama


Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and two-time National Book Award winner for fiction. Salvage the Bones won in 2011 (it also won a 2012 Alex Award), and Sing, the Unburied, Sing, won in 2017. Her other two books include her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds (2008) and a memoir, The Men We Reaped (2013), about the deaths of her brother and other young male friends.

Early years
Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, a small rural community in Mississippi. She developed a love-hate relationship with her hometown after having been bullied at public school by black classmates and, subsequently, by white students while attending a private school paid for by her mother’s employer.

Ward received her undergraduate degree from Stanford University, choosing to become a writer upon graduation in order to honor the memory of her younger brother killed by a drunk driver earlier that year.  Ward went on to earn an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan in 2005. At U of M she won five Hopwood Awards for essays, drama, and fiction.

Shortly afterwards, she and her family became victims of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina. With their house in De Lisle flooding rapidly, the Ward family set out in their car to get to a local church, but ended up stranded in a field full of tractors. When the white owners of the land eventually checked on their possessions, they refused to invite the Wards into their home, claiming they were overcrowded. Tired and traumatized, the refugees were eventually given shelter by another white family down the road.

Ward went on to work at the University of New Orleans, where her daily commute took her through neighborhoods ravaged by the hurricane. Empathizing with the struggle of the survivors and coming to terms with her own experience during the storm, Ward was unable to write creatively for three years—the time it took her to find a publisher for her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds.

In 2008 she returned to Stanford as a Stegner Fellow—one of the most prestigious awards available to emerging American writers.

Literary career
Earlier in 2008, just as Ward was deciding to give up writing and enroll in a nursing program, Where the Line Bleeds was accepted by Doug Seibold at Agate Publishing. Starting on the day twin protagonists Joshua and Christophe DeLisle graduate from high school, Where the Line Bleeds follows the brothers as their choices pull them in opposite directions. Unwilling to leave the small rural town on the Gulf Coast where they were raised by their loving grandmother, the twins struggle to find work, with Joshua eventually becoming a dock hand and Christophe joining his drug-dealing cousin.

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called Ward "a fresh new voice in American literature" who "unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope." The novel was picked as a Book Club Selection by Essence and received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Honor Award in 2009. It was shortlisted for the Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.

Her second novel Salvage the Bones (2011) homes in once more on the visceral bond between poor black siblings growing up on the Gulf Coast. Chronicling the lives of pregnant teenager Esch Batiste, her three brothers, and their father during the 10 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the day of the cyclone, and the day after, Ward uses a vibrant language steeped in metaphors to illuminate the fundamental aspects of love, friendship, passion, and tenderness.

Explaining her main character's fascination with the Greek mythological figure of Medea, Ward told Elizabeth Hoover of the Paris Review

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as "other." I wanted to align Esch with that classic text, with the universal figure of Medea, the antihero, to claim that tradition as part of my Western literary heritage. The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the savage, is essentially a universal, human one.

In 2011, Ward won the National Book Award in the Fiction category for Salvage the Bones. Interviewed by CNN’s Ed Lavandera, she said that both her nomination and her victory had come as a surprise, given that the novel had been largely ignored by mainstream reviewers. In a television interview with Anna Bressanin of BBC News on (December 22, 2011), Ward said...

When I hear people talking about the fact that they think we live in a post-racial America, … it blows my mind, because I don’t know that place. I’ve never lived there. … If one day, … they’re able to pick up my work and read it and see … the characters in my books as human beings and feel for them, then I think that that is a political act.

Jesmyn Ward received an Alex Award for Salvage the Bones in 2012. The Alex Awards are given out each year by the Young Adult Library Services Association to ten books written for adults that resonate strongly with young people aged 12 through 18.  Commenting on the winning books in School Library Journal, former Alex Award committee chair, Angela Carstensen described Salvage the Bones as a novel with "a small but intense following—each reader has passed the book to a friend."

In 2013, Ward published her memoir Men We Reaped. She announced on her blog two years earlier that she had finished the book's first draft, calling it the hardest thing she had ever written. The memoir explores the lives of her brother and four other young black men who lost their lives in her hometown. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/28/2013.)

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Book Reviews
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that's about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy…Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


The novel’s power comes from the dread of the approaching storm and a pair of violent climaxes. The first is a dog fight, an appalling spectacle given emotional depth by Skeetah’s love for the pit bull China (their bond is the strongest and most affecting in the book). When the hurricane strikes, Ms. Ward endows it, too, with attributes maternal and savage: ‘Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.
Wall Street Journal


Jesmyn Ward has written...the first Katrina-drenched fiction I'd press upon readers now.... Ward's pacing around the hurricane is exquisite—we nearly forget its impending savagery. The Batistes’ shared sacrifice is moving, made more so by their occasional shirking of sacrifice. Ward allows the letdowns integral to family life to play their part.
Cleveland Plain Dealer


Searing.... Despite the brutal world it depicts, Salvage the Bones is a beautiful read. Ward’s redolent prose conjures the magic and menace of the southern landscape.
Dallas Morning News


(Starred review.) Ward's poetic second novel covers the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina via the rich, mournful voice of Esch Batiste, a pregnant 14-year-old black girl living.… [T]hough her voice threatens to overpower the story, it does a far greater service to the book by giving its cast of small lives a huge resonance.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Ward uses fearless, toughly lyrical language to convey this family's close-knit tenderness, the sheer bloody-minded difficulty of rural African American life.… [A]n eye-opening heartbreaker that ends in hope.  —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal


A pitch-perfect account of struggle and community in the rural South… Though the characters in Salvage the Bones face down Hurricane Katrina, the story isn’t really about the storm. It’s about people facing challenges, and how they band together to overcome adversity.
BookPage

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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 Salvage the Bones:

1. How would you describe the Batiste family—first, as a family unit, then each of the members, Esch (our narrator), Claude (the father), Randall, Skeetah, and Junior? What motivates (or not) each of them? Which family member frustrates you most? Which do you admire most?

2. Talk about Bois Sauvage and its deprivations—the poverty, unemployment and housing. How does the area shape the people, especially young people, who live there? Or the reverse—do its residents shape Bois Sauvage?

3. The love affair Skeetah has with China is very much at the heart of this story. Is Skeetah right to rob neighbors to obtain medicine he needs for her?

4. Are you disturbed by the book's concentration on dog fighting? How does the author portray the fighting? Does the love Skeetah has for China contradict your understanding of that culture?

5. What about Esch's pregnancy? Why might the author have created a narrator, and central character, as a young pregnant teenager? What, overall, does the author of this book suggest about the nature of motherhood?

6. What is the symbolic meaning of Esch's fascination with the myth of Medea? What does the author mean, in an interview with the Paris Review, when she says...

Medea is in Hurricane Katrina because her power to unmake worlds, to manipulate the elements, closely aligns with the storm. And [Medea is] in Esch, too.*

7. Suspense is results from the fact that readers are anxious to learn what happens to characters. However, given that readers know the outcome of Katrina—that it will destroy almost everything in its path—how does Ward create suspense in this story?

8. In what way is Katrina both destructive and cleansing? What does Katrina represent symbolically?

9. In the book's title, the word "salvage" is close to "savage." According to the author, the term savage has honor to it: meaning that, when all has been lost, "you are strong, you are fierce, and you possess hope."* Talk about the interplay between those two words—salvage and savage—in other words, the way the two come together in this book.

10. Were you disappointed in how the book ended? Ward, having experienced firsthand the horrors of Katrina, has said in the Paris Review...

I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative ruthlessness. I couldn’t dull the edges and fall in love with my characters and spare them. Life does not spare us.*

Do you agree with her? Or is her view of life too harsh? Isn't there also the possibility that life will spare us? What do you think?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

*Paris Review.org, 8/30/2011

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