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 The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio:
1. How would you describe Terry Ryan's mother Evelyn and the challenges she faced as wife, mother, and family breadwinner.
2. Could Evelyn survive, even triumph as she did, in today's world? Or is ours a different time with its own set of circumstances?
3. You might read and discuss this work in tandem with Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle: both books are memoirs about parenting and growing up in difficult circumstances.
4. Have some fun...set up a display of several personal or household items and devise clever prize-winning jingo entries for each, like Evelyn did. Not easy!
5. Watch the movie version, in part or full, and compare it to the book. How closely does the film follow the book, especially in its characters? Does Julianne Moore capture your idea of what Evelyn was like?
(From LitLovers. Please feel free to use these ideas/questions, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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