You are welcome to use these reading guides for your book group discussions. Each guide is presented in its entirety for your perusal on this website. You can also use the link "Download PDF" so that you can email a guide or print it to your heart's content.

I am available for book group ‘appearances’ by phone and I’d also love to hear the results of your book group discussion. Just email me to arrange an 'appearance' or to share your discussion highlights.

The Spanish Pearl | Hit by a Farm

When I’d finished the manuscript for The Spanish Pearl, I asked various writing friends to read and critique it for me. My dear friend Phyllis had come to visit, so I’d handed her the fat three-ring binder containing the novel, and she said she was looking forward to taking it home and reading it. I left the room to look for something else, and when I came back five minutes later, Phyllis was sitting in the green velvet rocker, her nose buried in the last chapter of the book.

“PHYLLIS!” I yelled.

“WHAT?” she said, jumping a bit.

“Please tell me you aren’t reading the end of the book first.”

She looked down at the heavy binder in her lap, then up at me. “I’m reading the end of the book first.”

And thus I was introduced to a curious breed of readers known as RTEFers (Read The Ending First readers.) As I careened around the room, sputtering indignantly, Phyllis tried to explain. Apparently some people are unable to relax and enjoy a book if they don’t know how it ends first. “I just can’t concentrate until I know that the person survives, or the romance works, or the mystery is solved satisfactorily. I won’t even buy a book unless I know I like the ending.”

Falling into the other camp are readers, such as myself, who don’t want to know anything about what happens until we read it on the page. We are LMITDers, or Leave Me In The Dark readers. Sometimes book reviews (and reading guides) can provide so much detail, and explain so many of a novel’s twists and turns, that LMITDers want nothing to do with the book itself once they’ve read the review, even if it’s a positive review. That would be me.

Websites offer interesting challenges for authors who provide reading guides for their novels. What if a RFETer surfs by, reads the reading guide, and doesn’t learn enough about the ending? What if a LMITDer surfs by, inadvertently reads the reading guide, and suddenly knows too much?

I mean, really. What would have happened if Emily Brontë had set up a website from the parsonage at Haworth and included a reading guide? If you’d learned before buying Wuthering Heights that Catherine and Healthcliff never end up together, but both die tragic deaths, are you going to race right out and buy the book? Or what if Margaret Mitchell had included a reading guide for Gone With the Wind, and one of the questions had been: “What happened to Scarlett and Rhett’s relationship after their little daughter died?”

Accckk! They had a baby? She died?

The Spanish Pearl isn't a classic, and isn’t sad, but you get my meaning. So while I’m including a reading guide, it’s a carefully worded guide, hopefully providing enough for RTEFers to be interested, yet not so much that LMITDers are turned off. We writers walk a dangerous path.

1. In The Spanish Pearl, Kate falls back in time to 11th century Spain. In Diane Gabaldon’s Outlander, Claire falls back in time to 18th century Scotland. If a time machine suddenly appeared before you, to what time and place would you set the dial?
   
2. Kate’s skills as a modern woman do not help her much in the 11th century. What would it feel like if you suddenly had no idea how to function in a society? On what resources would you draw to survive? Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve been a ‘fish out of water’?
   
3. Kate is torn between two loves. How do we know what person to choose, if we’re in that position? How do people decide or recognize they’re in love with the ‘right’ person?
   
4. Luis Navarro’s best friend, Nuño Suarez, carries around a secret for over ten years. How do you think this secret has affected his life, and his relationship with Luis?
   
5. Do you think Kate Vincent has changed by the end of the book? I’m not sure she has, which is actually okay with me. Do you need a main character to undergo a major emotional transformation to keep you engaged in a novel?
   
6. Kate doesn't always make the best choices. Is this okay, or do you wish she was smarter and wiser and braver than the rest of us?
   
7. If you were suddenly ripped from your life, what would you miss most? Who would you miss most? What would be appealing about living in a different time?
   
8. Would you have made the same choice Kate made? Why or why not?
   
9. What do you hope/expect will happen in the sequel, The Crown of Valencia?

Many reading guides included in books make me feel as if I’m back in high school, taking an English Lit essay exam testing my comprehension of the book. Was I paying attention at the end of the third chapter when the name of her true father is revealed? Do I understand why the author did what she did in Chapter Ten?

Shouldn’t a book discussion discuss more than the book’s plot? Don’t books force us to think outside our lives? To think about how we were affected by the book, or not? Seems a reading guide should lead the discussion in this direction.

That’s why I’ve included a reading guide. I don’t want to test whether you remember the sheep gestation period is five months, or that I have one sister, or that roosters can be nasty. Instead, it might be more interesting to see if my sharing my life has affected yours.

To this end, here are some possible discussion questions for your book group:

1. Memoir is usually about a slice of a person’s life. In Hit By a Farm, were you satisfied with the size of the slice I included? Did you want more? Less? If you were to choose a slice of your life to share with others, which would it be?
   
2. Creative nonfiction works best when a number of themes, or threads, run through the book. When those different threads cross each other, there’s tension. Three threads seem to be a good number for me. What three threads or themes or plot lines run through Hit By a Farm ?
   
3. What three threads run through your own life? What happens when these threads connect or cross? With so many of us living lives with multiple threads, why don’t our heads just explode?
   
4. One of the book’s chapters is called “Meeting My Meat.” What did you think of this essay? How did it make you feel? Do you know where your meat comes from? Do you know how it’s raised? Is that even important? Are there any aspects of eating meat that make you uncomfortable?
   
5. Melissa and I have been together for almost 23 years. In this book we have opened our front door a crack and let you, the reader, inside parts of our relationship, so it should come as no surprise that I consider myself married in every sense of the word, except legally.
   How do you feel about marriage? Should the states limit marriage to a man and a woman? After reading Hit By a Farm , do you think the love two women, or two men, feel for each other is different than the love a man and a woman feel for each other? Why is this such a difficult issue? How would the lives of heterosexual people change if gays and lesbians were allowed to legally marry?
   
6. In Hit By a Farm I struggle with boundaries—how to establish them, how to know when to defend them, when to ignore them. What sorts of boundaries do people create in their lives? If you successfully create and maintain boundaries, how do you do this? If you’re terrible at creating and defending boundaries, why?
   
7. In “Nature’s Sentimental Journey,” I complain that poems often just focus on the lovely side of nature. Do you witness much nature in your life? Have you seen the uglier side of nature? Do you consider livestock, such as sheep, cattle, hogs, and chickens, to be part of nature? Are they something different?
   
8. My becoming a farmer for the sake of love seems a little crazy, now that I’ve gone and done it. I know I’m not the only one who lost sight of her dreams (at least temporarily) for the sake of her partner. If this has happened to you, how did you find your way back? If you haven’t yet, what do you need to get there? Who can help you? How can we help each other?
   
9. Why are the things that go wrong in our lives often funnier than the things that go right?