Chosen by a Horse 
Susan Richards, 2006
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156031172


Summary  
The horse Susan Richards chose for rescue wouldn’t be corralled into her waiting trailer. Instead Lay Me Down, a former racehorse with a foal close on her heels, walked right up that ramp and into Susan’s life. This gentle creature—malnourished, plagued by pneumonia and an eye infection—had endured a rough road, but somehow her heart was still open and generous.

It seemed fated that she would come into Susan’s paddock and teach her how to embrace the joys of life despite the dangers of living.

An elegant and often heartbreaking tale filled with animal characters as complicated and lively as their human counterparts, this is an inspiring story of courage and hope and the ways in which all love—even an animal’s—has the power to heal. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Education—B.A. University of Colorado, M.S.W., Adelphi
   University (New York)
• Currently—lives in Bearsville, New York

Susan Richards has a B.A. in English from the University of Colorado and a Master of Social Work degree from Adelphi University. She lives in Bearsville, New York and teaches writing at SUNY Ulster and Marist College. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
A sucker for horses and horse stories, I couldn't resist the beautiful face on the cover. It wouldn't matter if the writing inside were drivel. But it's not. Inside is a lovely story about redemption for both horse and human. Get the kleenex box.
A LitLovers LitPick (March '08)


The horse was Lay Me Down, a tall, scrawny, sick (with pneumonia), abused standardbred mare, with a hostile foal at her heels and a wheezing sigh. The human was middle-aged, also abused (both as a child and in a bad marriage), an AA veteran and the owner of three Morgan horses in upstate New York. The Morgan mare, Georgia, was furious about the new intruder, although, Richards writes, "I blamed myself for creating a monster, a monster named Georgia. All these years of spoiling her, of never allowing anyone else to ride her, of letting her boss me around...." Richards's first book is an engaging, honest and low-key memoir of her love affair with the sweet-natured Lay Me Down and her almost love affair with a fellow named Hank, with many digressions into horse lore as well as life lore. Charming and sensitive descriptions of fiery Georgia; the gallant, lovable old gelding, Hotshot; loyal friend and "horsewoman extraordinaire" Allie; and daily life with animals intersperse with the trials of dating and buying underwear. The end of neither affair is happy, but this is a bracing and likable book, highly recommended for backyard horsewomen and their admirers.
Publisher's Weekly


Psychotherapist and animal lover Richards (writing, Marist Coll., Poughkeepsie, NY) eloquently and movingly recounts her relationship with a horse. Hers is the story of how a removed, emotionally damaged person and an abused animal form a bond that is a godsend for both parties. The author, who normally avoids sick and dying animals and humans alike, agrees to rescue an ailing mare named Lay Me Down and nurses her back to health while marveling at how trusting, kind, and gentle she is despite having been neglected and abused by a former owner. Sadly, the mare develops cancer and eventually has to be euthanized. Though this death is heart-wrenching for Richards, her relationship with the mare has helped her regain the will to reconnect with people and to make important changes in her life. Patrons who like Lauren Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit: An American Legend), Jane Smiley (Horse Heaven), and Susan Nusser (In Service to the Horse: Chronicles of a Labor of Love) will love this book as well. —Patsy Gray, Huntsville P.L., AL
Library Journal


Affectionate memoir about an SPCA rescue horse fostered by a lonely social worker. Richards already owned three horses when she responded to a desperate plea from the SPCA asking for volunteers to foster abused mares and their foals. The mare she was given, Lay Me Down, was a lame, half-starved creature who "looked like a complicated wire coat hanger draped with a mud-caked brown pelt." The trusting mare, who had been valued at $100,000 at the height of her racing career some 12 years earlier, now walked with a pronounced limp in both front legs, and had painful arthritis in both rear hocks. Despite her history of injuries and abuse, Lay Me Down retained an affable temperament that deeply impressed her new owner, herself a survivor of childhood and domestic abuse. A little romance even enters the picture when Richards's gelding Hotshot courts the new arrival: "Their mutual attraction was instant and strong. . . . Together, they were a duet of contentment." Inspired by Lay Me Down's example, Richards decides to abandon her hermit-like ways and actually goes on a date: "If Lay Me Down could risk loving, so could I." All too soon, Richards realizes something is wrong with her new equine charge. One of Lay Me Down's eyes protrudes, and she is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. A trip to Cornell's veterinary hospital confirms the worst, leaving Richards to cling to the hope that Lay Me Down, who had been imprisoned for years in a dark stall, live till spring, and bask once more in the sun's warmth. A tender lesson in courage and dependence.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. How are Susan’s horses a substitute for a human family? What needs do they fulfill that people in her life cannot? Does Susan use her horses to escape from “real life” (the pressures of romantic relationships, loneliness, et cetera), or do they represent it?

2. How do Susan’s past struggles—the loss of her parents, her abusive childhood, her alcoholism, and her divorce—continue to affect her life on a daily basis so many decades later?

3. Susan often jumps around chronologically as she tells her story. What effect does this have on the reader and on the presentation of Susan’s life?

4. Susan’s friend Allie often accuses her of “anthropomorphizing” her animals. How do the horses in Susan’s paddock resemble human characters? What effect does this have on the power of her memoir? Does this literary technique place her memoir in line with other classic animal stories? Did this book remind you of any of your childhood favorites? In what ways?

5. Susan accuses Georgia of engaging in “rude” horse behavior, such as nudging her pockets looking for treats and blocking the other horses from entering the stable. Later Susan states, “If [Georgia] was a person I’d hate her” (page 226). Why do you think Susan indulges Georgia and allows this kind of behavior from her? What about Georgia’s personality makes her lovable as a horse but not as a person?

6. What function does Hank serve in Susan’s life? Would she have been better off if he had not called her six years later? If he had not been allergic to horses, would Susan have been able to commit herself to him as a partner?

7. Early on Susan states that “names are important to horse people” (page 6). When she initially imagines shouting Lay Me Down’s name across a pasture she feels that she has gotten a “loser” because “you couldn’t get a nickname out of it.” How do Susan’s feelings about her horse’s name change as her memoir progresses? How do you feel about Lay Me Down’s name by the close of the book?

8. What does Lay Me Down’s calm and trusting demeanor, even after a traumatic past (page 157), say about the “nature versus nurture” argument?

9. In what way do you feel the author was “chosen” by Lay Me Down? Could she have been chosen by another person, or another animal, and still have learned the same lessons about her life that she learns in this book?

10. Animals are often said to possess healing influences—some studies suggest that elderly people who keep pets have lower rates of heart disease, stroke, and depression. What do you think it is about animals that humans find so calming? Is this something humans can't provide for each other? Do you have a particular pet that seemed to have a special effect on you?

11. At the start of her memoir Susan speaks about her “aversion to illness”—her tendency to avoid hospitals, sickness, and “anything medical” (page 2). In caring for Lay Me Down she is forced to confront illness head on. How does this help Susan grow, heal, and come to terms with her past?

12. The death of a pet can always be traumatic for its owners. How was Lay Me Down's time with Susan Richards different from that of an average pet? How does Lay Me Down’s death affect Susan? Is this a normal reaction to the loss of an animal friend? If not, how and why?

13. What do you think the author has learned through the events described in the book? Would Susan’s life have been easier, and less painful, if she had avoided an emotional connection with a damaged horse? Can we arrange our lives in ways that help us to avoid suffering? If so, at what cost?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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The House on Fortune Street
Margot Livesey, 2008
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061451546

Summary
It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail Taylor and Dara MacLeod when they meet at university and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later they remain inseparable: Abigail, the actress, allegedly immune to romance, and Dara, a therapist, throwing herself into relationships with frightening intensity.

Now both believe they've found "true love." But luck seems to run out when Dara moves into Abigail's downstairs apartment. Suddenly both their friendship and their relationships are in peril, for tragedy is waiting to strike the house on Fortune Street. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—July 24, 1953
• Where—Perth, Scotland, UK
• Education—B.A., University of York, England
• Awards—L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts, USA


Margot Livesey is a Scottish born writer. She is the author of eight novels, numerous short stories, and essays on the craft of writing fiction.

Livesey came to North America during the 1970s where she worked to get her fiction published, reportedly because her boyfriend at the time was also a writer.

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and a number of literary quarterlies. She is also the Fiction Editor at Ploughshares, a renowned literary journal. Livesey served as a judge for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2012.

She currently lives in the Boston area and is the writer-in-residence at Emerson College and at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has formally served as a professor at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon University, Brandeis University, Cleveland State University, Williams College, and at the University of California, Irvine. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/16/2016.)

When asked by Barnes and Noble editors in 2004, what book influenced her the most, Livesey had this to say:

This sounds self-centered but the book that had the biggest impact on me as a writer was the novel I wrote when I was twenty-two and traveling around Europe and North Africa. When I reread it at the end of the year I was amazed at how completely I had failed to be influenced by the many wonderful books I'd read. My characters were unbelievable, their conversations preposterous, the plot simultaneously dull and far-fetched, etc., etc. Seeing the enormous gap between the books I loved and my own was what made me want to be a writer in a serious way.

Book Reviews
What does it mean to be an unmarried woman?.... In her new novel, The House on Fortune Street, Margot Livesey brings nuance, context and a cool head to this hot-button issue through detailed portraits of two friends in their 30s: Abigail, who owns the house of the title, and Dara, who rents the downstairs apartment. Both women are unmarried, but they have distinct emotional templates and back stories that give them different ideas about the role men ought to play in their lives.… Livesey, the author of half a dozen previous works of fiction, is a lovely, cautious writer. She likes to take her time building the atmosphere her characters move through, adding increments of color, dot by dot.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times

For all its melancholy, the novel leaves readers with a surprising hopefulness. Some of this arises from the pleasures of its style: Livesey has chosen every detail here with precision, from toast crumbs to paint colors, to evoke the shimmering illusion of these characters' home-based lives. For all her care, the construction feels effortless. Even the stark divisions of the book into quarters seem inevitable rather than jarring.
Donna Rifkind - Washington Post

The absorbing latest from Livesey (Homework) opens multiple perspectives on the life of Dara MacLeod, a young London therapist, partly by paying subtle homage to literary figures and works. The first of four sections follows Keats scholar Sean Wyman: his girlfriend, Abigail, is Dara's best friend, and the couple lives upstairs from Dara in the titular London house. While Dara tries to coax her boyfriend Edward to move out of the house he shares with his ex-girlfriend and daughter, Sean receives a mysterious letter implying that Abigail is having an affair, and both relationships start to fall apart. The second section, set during Dara's childhood, is narrated by Dara's father, who has a strange fascination with Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and shares Dodgson's creepy interest in young girls. Dara's meeting with Edward dominates part three, which mirrors the plot of Jane Eyre, and the final part, reminiscent of Great Expectations, is told mainly from Abigail's college-era point of view. The pieces cross-reference and fit together seamlessly, with Dara's fate being revealed by the end of part one and explained in the denouement. Livesey's use of the classics enriches the narrative, giving Dara a larger-than-life resonance.
Publishers Weekly

Life has a way of parceling out both good luck and bad, and for the residents of the duplex on the ironically named Fortune Street.... Intricately weaving the cause and effect of each character’s circumstances into four self-contained but essentially linked episodes, Livesey, polished and intriguing as ever, explores the sinuous themes of regret and responsibility, truth and trust with an understated, yet tenacious certainty. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

Dara, a therapist at a women's center, lives in the downstairs flat of her friend Abigail's London home. A workaholic actress and theatrical producer, Abigail lives upstairs with her boyfriend, Sean, a struggling Keats scholar and writer. Although Dara and Abigail were best friends in college, their lives are so busy there is not much time for getting together. Sean is financially strapped and agrees to coauthor a book on euthanasia. He suspects Abigail is having an affair. Dara is involved with a married man she is perennially sure will leave his wife. And although she is often able to help her clients with their problems, Dara has never resolved issues revolving around her parents' divorce. Her father, Cameron, has never been able to tell her he struggled with attractions to young girls, whom he photographed obsessively. How these four characters ultimately fail at connecting with each other results in a tragedy three will regret for the rest of their lives. Livesey's latest novel (after Banishing Verona) keeps readers brooding over the power of secrets in this dark and disturbing psychological tale. Recommended for literary fiction collections.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - Library Journal

Love proves a destructive force in the lives of four Brits who have divergent perspectives on their interrelated dilemmas in another probing, satisfying novel from Livesey (Banishing Verona, 2004, etc.). In its first section, the story seems to be about a selfish, heartless actress, Abigail, who breaks up poor graduate student Sean's marriage, then sleeps with his university chum Valentine. Abigail's so busy and preoccupied she doesn't notice that her best friend, Dara, is in suicidal despair over a lying lover-but then again, neither does Sean until he comes across Dara's body in the downstairs flat of the house they all share on Fortune Street in London. The book's second section concerns Dara's childhood, seen through the eyes of her father Cameron, who has an unconsummated but unwholesome interest in prepubescent girls. His wife throws him out when she realizes his fondness for Dara's best friend is more than fatherly, and we see in the third section that his daughter has never recovered from Cameron's abrupt disappearance when she was ten. We also see that Dara is partly responsible for her disappointments in love, because she makes her boyfriends the obsessive center of her life. She's rather shocked by Abigail's casual attitude toward sex; even though the two women have been close since they met at university, their totally different personalities often chafe. Abigail, whose feckless parents let her work her way through both high school and university, is tough-minded and something of a user. She loves Dara, but can't understand her friend's neurotic vulnerability. In the moving final pages, Cameron confesses to Abigail what he could never tell Dara, and both confront their failures. "There was no question of them forgiving each other," Abigail bleakly concludes. Yet the novel is filled with sorrowful wisdom about the fallible human heart and our myopic view of ourselves and those we love. Moving, gruffly tender and piercingly truthful. Livesey has plenty of critical respect already, but her talents merit a broad popular audience as well.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Sean is characterized as someone who would rather not revisit "uncomfortable memories," and, as the anonymous letter says, "see what's right in front of [his] face." Is this tendency particular to Sean alone, or do other characters in the book suffer from the same myopia?

2. When Cameron takes Dara to the Charles Dodgson exhibit, he is trying to share something of himself with her. What makes him step back and, once again, refrain from divulging more of his inner life? Would telling her have helped Dara?

3. Is Dara deluding herself in her belief that Edward will leave his wife? How do Edward's intentions look through the eyes of other characters?

4. What role does coincidence play in the stories of all four characters? What role does it play in bringing the threads of these stories together?

5. Several characters in this book are profoundly affected by a past event, which they're never able either to come to terms with, or to fully understand. What is Livesey saying about the nature of childhood memories, particularly traumatic ones?

6. What role do letters play in the novel? What kind of information do they contain and, in each instance, how do they change the course of the narrative?

7. Each main character in the book has an affinity with a specific literary figure: Sean with John Keats; Cameron with Charles Dodgson; Dara with Charlotte Brontë; and Abigail with Charles Dickens. How do these "literary godparents" complement the reader's understanding of each character and his or her situation?

8. Abigail's story comes last. How does our view of Abigail—both in her dealings with Sean, and her dealings with Dara—change when we see events play out through her eyes? What part of Abigail's background is most influential in the formation of her character?

9. The story of The House on Fortune Street comes to us, piece by piece, through the perspectives of four characters. How does the order of the voices affect your reading of the novel as a whole?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
Jim Fergus and J. Will Dodd (Intro), 1998
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312199432

Summary
Based on actual historical events, One Thousand White Women is the poignant story of May Dodd's journey west.

Committed to an insane asylum by her blueblood family for an affair with a man beneath her station, May finds that her only hope of freedom is to participate in a secret government program whereby women from the "civilized" world become the brides of Cheyenne warriors.

She soon falls in love with John Bourke, a gallant young army captain, even though she is married to the great chief Little Wolf. Caught between two worlds and two men, Dodd is forced to make tough decisions that will change her life forever. (From the publisher.)

Read the novel's 2017 sequel: The Mothers of Vengenace.

Author Bio 
• Birth—1950
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Education—Colorado College
• Awards—Mountains & Plains Booksellers Assn. - Fiction of the Year Award
• Currently—divides his time between Arizona, Colorado, and France


Jim Fergus is an American born author, best know for his 1998 novel Ten Thousand White Woman. Fergus was born in Chicago; his mother was French mother and father American. He attended high school in Massachusetts and headed out West to study English at Colorado College.

 After working as a tennis pro for 10 years, in 1980 he moved to Rand, Colorado, with its 13 residents. There he began freelance writing full time, publishing 100s of articles, essays, and interviews for various national publications.

A devoted traveler, Fergus published his first book, a travel/sporting memoir titled, A Hunter's Road, in 1992. The LA Times called it "an absorbing, provocative, and even enchanting book."

Fergus’s first novel, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd came out in 1998. The novel won the 1999 Fiction of the Year Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association and has since sold over a million copies in the U.S. and France.

In 1999, Fergus published The Sporting Road, a collection of outdoor articles and essays. That book was followed in 2005 with his second novel, The Wild Girl: The Notebooks of Ned Giles, historical fiction set in the 1930’s in Chicago, Arizona, and the Sierra Madre of Mexico.

Marie-Blanche, which he published in France in 2011, is historical fiction set in France and based on his own family — the complex and ultimately fatal relationship between Fergus’s French mother and grandmother.

In 2013, Fergus published another novel, first in France as Chrysis: Portrait de l’Amour, later that year in the U.S. as The Memory of Love. Set in the 1920s, the novel is a love story based on the life of a true life woman painter, Chrysis Jungbluth.

Fergus published a follow-up in 2017 to his widely known One Thousand White Women. The sequel, The Mothers of Vengeance, follows white women married to Cheyennes who seek vengeance after their husbands and children were killed during a raid by U.S. troops.
                                               
Jim Fergus divides his time between southern Arizona, northern Colorado, and France, (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The best writing transports readers to another time and place, so that when they reluctantly close the book, they are astonished to find themselves returned to their everyday lives. One Thousand White Women is such a book. Jim Fergus so skillfully envelops us in the heart and mind of his main character, May Dodd, that we weep when she mourns, we shake our fist at anyone who tries to sway her course, and our hearts pound when she is in danger.
Colorado Springs Gazette

An imaginative fictional account of the participation of May Dodd and others in the controversial "Brides for Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program.… This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history. —Grace Fill
Booklist

Long, brisk, charming…. Reading about life among the Cheyenne is spellbinding…. An impressive historical, terse, convincing, and affecting.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. One Thousand White Women was written by a man, but in a woman's point of view. Did you find this convincing?

2. In 1875, rebellious or unorthodox women were sometimes considered "hysterical" or insane. Is this still true in some circumstances today?

3. Does May Dodd remind you of a modern-day woman?

4. What would be today's equivalent of traveling west to an unknown part of the country with a group of strangers?

5. Did you feel the Native Americans were accurately portrayed in the novel?

6. If the "Brides for Indians" program were actually put into effect in 1875, do you feel it would have been effective?

7. What circumstances would prompt you to undergo a journey like the one May Dodd took?

8. Do you consider One Thousand White Women a tragic story? If so, why? If not, why not?

9. Of the supporting female characters, who did you find the most likeable?

10. Were any of May Dodd's actions unsympathetic? Would you find it difficult to leave your children behind in order to escape a horrendous situation?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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So Long a Letter
Mariama Ba, (trans., Modupe Bode-Thomas) 1987
Heinemann Publishing
96 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780435913526

Summary
So Long a Letter is a sequence of reminiscences recounted by the (fictional) recently widowed Sengalese school teacher Ramatoulaye. It is a record of Ramatoulaye's emotional struggle for survival after her husband's abrupt decision to take a second wife.

The novel is a perceptive testimony to the plight of thoes articulate women who live in a social milieux dominated by attitudes and values that deny them their proper place.

So Long a Letter won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and was recognised as one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century in an initiative organised by the Zimbabwe International Book Fair. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1929
• Where—Dakar, Senegal, Africa
• Died—1981
• Education—Ecole Normale, Senegal
• Awards—The first Noma Prize for Publishing in Africa, 1980

Mariama Ba was a Senegalese author and feminist, who wrote in French. Born in Dakar, she was raised a Muslim, but at an early age came to criticise what she perceived as inequalities between the sexes of the African and Islamic traditions.

Her frustration with the fate of African women is expressed in her first novel, So Long a Letter. In it she depicts the sorrow and resignation of a woman who must share the mourning for her late husband with his second and younger wife. Abiola Irele called it "the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction." This short book was awarded the first Noma Prize for Publishing in Africa in 1980.

Ba died a year later, in 1981, after a protracted illness before publishing her second novel, Scarlet Song. That novel describes the hardships a woman faces when her husband abandons her for a younger woman.

In addition to her career as a writer, Ba was also a teacher and feminist. She was among the first to illustrate the disadvantaged position of women in African society, focusing on the importance of the grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, cousin and friend—how each deserves the title, “mother of Africa.” Her source of determination and commitment to the feminist cause stemmed from her background, her parent’s life and her schooling.

Ba was born in Dakar Senegal in 1929, into an educated and well-to-do Senegalese family. Her father was a career civil servant who became Minister of Health in 1956 (one of the first ministers of state). One of her grandfathers served as an interpreter in the French occupation regime.

After her mother’s death, Ba was raised largely in the traditional manner by her maternal grandparents. Altough she received an early education in French, and attended a Koranic school, her grandparents had no plans to educate her beyond primary school. It was ony at her father's insistence that she continued her studies, eventually entering the Ecole Normale, where she prepared for a career as a school teacher. Ba taught from 1947 to 1959, before transferring to the Regional Inspectorate of Teaching as an educational inspector. She also married a Senegalese member of Parliament, Obeye Diop, but divorced him and was left to care for their nine children.

Ba saw the failure of African liberation struggles, and her earliest works call for a rejection of the “French assimilationist policy.” She also advocated a reconsideration and reinvigor-ation of African life—criticizing the unequal balance of power between men and married women, in particular. Ba became active in women’s associations, defending women’s rights and promoting female education through speeches and articles in local newspapers. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
So Long a Letter is a landmark book—a sensation in its own country and an education for outsiders. Mariama Ba, a longtime women's activist, set out to write a book that exposed the double standard between men and women in Africa. The result, So Long a Letter, eventually won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa. The book itself takes the form of a long letter written by a widow, Ramatoulaye, to her friend, over the mandatory forty-day mourning period following the death of a husband. Both women had married for love and had happy, productive marriages; both were educated, had work they loved and were intellectually alive. During their lives, both of these women's husbands chose to take a second wife—and each woman then made a different choice. Ramatoulaye decided to stay married, although it meant rarely seeing her husband and knowing that he was squandering money on a young girl, a friend of her own daughter. Ramatoulaye's friend divorced her husband and eventually left the country, settling in the United States. In her letter, Ramatoulaye examines her life and that of other women of Senegal—their upbringing and training and the cultural restrictions placed upon them. It is a devastating attack, made all the more powerful because of the intelligence and maturity of the narrator and the ability of Mariama Ba to honor two very different choices within one framework.
Erica Bauermeister - 500 Great Books by Women

It is not only the fact that this is the most deeply felt presentation of the female condition in African fiction that gives distinction to this novel, but also its undoubted literary qualities, which seem to place it among the best novels that have come out of our continent.
West Africa

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 So Long a Letter:

1. Talk about the treatment of women—in terms of upbringing, training, and cultural restrictions—in Senegal.

2. How does Ramatoulaye's life in Africa and Aissatou's life in the United States differ? How do their view of men and marriage differ? Why does Ramatoulaye decide to stay married to her husband, while her friend divorces hers. Which woman's decision to you agree with...or were both decisions the correct one for each woman?

3. What, if anything, does Ramatoulaye learn from her correspondence with her girlhood friend?

4. How does Ramatoulaye rationalize the differences between men and women? Do you agree...or disagree with her views?

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

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