Readers’ Guide

1. Alison struggles with her identity from a very young age, wanting to figure out where she’s from. What impact does knowing our ancestry have on identity? Why might it matter? How do you think it might have impacted you to have been brought up in a different family? Did you ever wish you belonged to a different family?
2. Alison seeks solace in landscape, connects to Scottish soil as a kind of mother, and feels safe to be herself there. Is our identity a fixed thing to be discovered, or can it shift and change depending on with whom and where we live? How does our environment impact identity development and the ability to remain true to ourselves?
3. Modern American culture tends to believe in adoption as an entirely positive experience. By contrast, in 2023, the Scottish Government offered an adoption apology to people of Alison’s age group, recognizing the harms that adoption had caused to biological mothers and fathers as well as to adoptees. What ideas around adoption does Alison’s experience challenge, reinforce, or create questions about for you?
4. Eilidh writes to Jayne as a way of maintaining a sense of connection as well as offering the stories and wisdom of her ancestors to a new generation. Can we feel an authentic connection to someone we’ve never met? If so, how is that established and maintained?
5. Eilidh recognizes that Mary doesn’t feel the old stories to be valuable. Nonetheless, the older she gets, the more Eilidh seems to believe in the wisdom that she has received from her grandmother. What is lost when the younger generation dismisses the wisdom of the elder generation? What stands in the way of this connection? What might heal such a rift?
6. Alison’s deep, perhaps desperate, desire to belong—or to at least appear to belong—drives much of her decision-making. In what ways is our desire to belong helpful to our growth and development? In what ways might it thwart or be harmful? Can we truly feel a sense of connectedness and belonging if we are pretending to be someone we are not?
7. Although Alison does make significant choices throughout the novel—having her first child and marrying Wade, for instance—she doesn’t truly have a sense of her own agency. Why? What blocks her from being connected to the full range of choices that she has?
8. Alison is afraid to approach the Traveller woman (I used the pejorative in the novel because it was what was used in that place and time). Eilidh and Mary are afraid to challenge the social and church norms of the time. Mary is also afraid of what the islanders will say to her, and to Jayne if she were to bring her home. If you were to advise, them, what would you say? Does Mary’s relinquishment of Jayne save either of them?