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 Shattered Dreams:
1. Talk about the obvious—monogamy. What is your attitude toward its practice: are you neutral toward it? Offended by it? Do you support it—or its right to be practiced?
2. If a religious group truly believes that polygamy is a necessary path to salvation, does the government have a right to prohibit it? What is the state's legitimate interest in preventing polygamy?
3. Discuss "the Principle," by which Irene's and other fundamentalist families live.
4. Talk about the wives and their varying relationships to one another. How would you react, as one of nine wives?
5. Discuss Irene's statement:
All the books I had read on Mormon polygamy were vivid accounts of sacrificing women who upheld and emphatically stated they loved "the Principle." Yet, I was convinced that these committed women...had been forbidden to give way to their true feelings, so they smothered their own agony and wrenching pain, as I too had been emphatically instructed to do.
What is the price one pays for living against one's "true feelings" as Irene says of herself? Does relgion have the right to ask one to sacrifice one's "true feelings" for a higher purpose?
6. All religions ask us to live according to certain belief-based rules, but when at what point do those rules become unfair, excessive, or irrelevant? Think of Catholicism and the prohibition of birth control; Judaism and the prohibition of pork; Islam and the covering of women.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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