- What do you think it would have been like to leave your homeland and travel alone to a new country and a new life in the late nineteenth century?
- How do think Mary Agnes fared for a 13-year-old girl alone? What were some of her biggest challenges?
- What choices that Mary Agnes made do you agree with? What choices do you disagree with?
- Colorado in the late nineteenth century was a wild and untamed place. How do you think women survived on the frontier of the American West, with or without a man?
- Men like Rooster will always take advantage of vulnerable young girls. In what ways do men take advantage of vulnerable girls and women today? What steps can be implemented to curb or stop this predatory behavior?
- During the novel, Mary Agnes dreams of Ireland often. Is there a place you dream about, real or imagined?
- If you were offered the choice to leave your home at age 13, where would you have gone at the time? Or nowhere at all? What about now?
- Have you ever felt marginalized? If so, how? How can we affect change to marginalized peoples?
- Women before 1920 in the U.S. didn’t have much agency, i.e. no voting rights, no property rights, no family rights, no reproductive rights, etc. What agency did Mary Agnes have? How much more agency would she have today?
- There’s a line in the novel about grudges. Why is it that people can’t come to their own funerals? They might be surprised to hear the words spoken there, after a living a whole life where words were too few and grudges too great. How do you deal with grudges?
- What family member would you like to research? Why? And how would you go about starting this research? Would you write about it?
- Put into words your thoughts to your 13-year-old self. What would you say to encourage her/him/them?