The suggested questions are included to enhance your group’s reading of Elizabeth Hardinger’s All the Forgivenesses.
1. How does Bertie’s “voice” affect the way you saw her as a person? How would the story change if it were told by, say, Bertie’s mother? Dacia? Alta Bea? Sam?
2. What would you say are the main themes of the novel?
3. The book portrays key relationships between Bertie and her parents, her two sisters, her friend Alta Bea, and her husband, Sam. Other relationships—such as the triad of Bertie, her mother, and Dacia—are also important. Do any of these relationships embody the themes you identified? In what ways? How do these relationships change over the course of the novel?
4. After her father’s aborted attempt at farming in Missouri, Bertie says that his “spirit got broke” by the older boys’ embrace of mechanization. She adds, “Daddy wasn’t nothing special no more in his own mind.” Is she right? What role does drinking play in his psyche? How is it like or unlike Polly’s use of “dope” given her by the doctor?
5. Did you find Bertie’s plight—social, economic, familial, physical, psychological—relatable? What did you think about the decisions Bertie made to cope with them? Consider also the situations of the other main characters.
6. Bertie says that her finding Sam was “great good luck.” What do you think Sam sees in Bertie (and vice versa)? What keeps them together when things go wrong for them? Looking back on the big turning points in your own life, do you think it was luck (good or bad) that determined the outcome? If not, what was it?
7. Bertie says she failed the “sacred task” of parenting her siblings. Why, then, does she still want children?
8. They say every novel has a “monster.” Who or what is the monster in this novel? Why?
9. Why does Dacia send her own children to Bertie? Were you surprised by that? Did you sympathize with Dacia? How do you think Dacia’s story continues?
10. Bertie struggles to understand how to deal with Trouble. How does Bertie’s struggle with her nephew mirror the overall change she undergoes in the novel?
11. Did you learn anything new about the time and place(s) in which the novel is set? How might the outcomes differ if the story took place today, or in a different region?