Twenty Questions: Book Club Discussion Questions for The Findlings

For those of you who plan to read and discuss The Findlings in a book-club setting, you might consider using the following questions as conversation starters:

1. What were some of your initial assumptions about the various characters, and how did those assumptions evolve as your read on?
2. What role did truth and dishonesty play in the lives of the various characters?
3. Whose side did you find yourself taking in chapter two’s family dinner?
4. Why do you think the author chose to have a disembodied narrator who was on a mission?
   

"Joanne Wilshin's THE FINDLINGS is an emotional exploration of the impact of adoption on identity. Through its believable and struggling characters, readers are able to understand the complexity of family in all of its forms." IndieReader.com

Available in paperback or ebook on Amazon.

Read "The Findlings Blog" for fascinating background details and for more on Joanne's continued search to find her birthfather's side of her family.

5. What part did honesty, or the lack of it, play in Victor’s life?
6.  How did you feel reading about Bibi and Delilah’s forays into the occult? What do you think drove them?
7.   In the opening scene, Anna and Delilah are at odds with one another. How did this disagreement play out in the rest of the book?
8.  How did the six senses help or hinder the four siblings reconnecting in their thirties?
9.  How would this story have changed if it were to take place in the 2020s?
10. The Findlings is based on the real event of the author meeting her birth mother for the first time in thirty years. How did that knowledge affect your enjoyment and/or understanding of the book?
11. Which character, in your opinion, made the biggest mistake, and why?
12. Which character, in your opinion, was the bravest, and why?
13. The book’s chapter titles are take-offs on phrases from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem about time and memory. How were you affected by the chapter titles?
14. How would this story be similar and different if it took place today?
15. With which character do you most and least identify, and why?
16. What are the various motives driving Anna?
17. What is the relationship between Delilah and Grace?
18. In what ways were you surprised by how the relationship between Bibi and her mother Signe changed?
19. What role did suppressed-memory play in the book? What role has supressed-memory play in your life?
20. What would you like to ask the author?