About those publisher's questions - even after a lot of editing to make them shorter, these were seriously essay questions! None of that "who was your favorite character?" stuff for this book. Lesson learned - more editing if we ever come across this kind of thing again. They were good questions - but every question was at least three questions.
Maybe the toughest part of talking about this book is keeping track of who is who and which side of the family tree they come down on. For other book clubs, I'd seriously recommend a copy of the family tree at the front of the back be blown up and put up for reference - I'd even suggest a couple of quick notes about each character be added. Our conversation would have been much smoother if we wouldn't have had to keep reminding ourselves of which character a question was referring to.
We did spend a fair amount of time talking about the book but it was an effort to keep things on track.
In the end, even with all of those questions, one of the lessons we learned from this book is that sometimes there are no easy answers...and sometimes there isn't an answer at all.
