The Children Book Club Questions & Discussion Guide

About this book

Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe grew up as the supposedly enchanted children at the heart of their mother's world-famous fantasy series, but the reality behind the books was a neglectful, near-feral childhood on an isolated Vermont farm that ended in a deadly fire. Twenty years later, Guin is coasting on her late mother's fame when her estranged artist brother announces a new work titled, simply, Mother, and the past she has worked to forget begins to surface. Moving between the 1990s and the present, this gothic, faintly uncanny novel asks what we owe the truth when the prettier story is the one everyone already loves.

Discussion questions

1. The Sharpe siblings have two childhoods, the one in their mother's famous books and the one they actually lived. What was your first impression of the gap between them, and how did it sit with you by the end?
2. The story moves between 1990s Vermont and the present day. If the pacing tested you anywhere, which timeline kept you reading, and why do you think it held you?
3. Guin has built an adult life coasting on her mother's name while Ennis has spurned it. What did each sibling's strategy for surviving their childhood reveal about them?
4. Edith turned her own children into beloved characters while neglecting them in life. Where did you land on the question the book keeps circling: can art that takes this much from real people still be worth it?
5. The novel is fascinated by the distance between the stories we tell about our families and the truth underneath. What was it finally saying about which version we end up believing, and why?
6. Albert blurs the line between gothic realism and something more uncanny. Did you read the strange, magical edges of the book as literal, psychological, or deliberately unresolved, and does it matter?
7. The isolated farmhouse, and the woods the children escape into, almost breathe on the page. How did that atmosphere shape the way you experienced the family's story?
8. Many of us grew up on a series that felt like home. Did the book change how you think about a childhood favorite, or about the author behind it?
9. Guin and Ennis grew up side by side and remember it completely differently. Has anyone at the table shared a childhood event with a sibling who recalls it nothing like you do?
10. Who is this book for, the gothic-and-atmosphere reader or the family-secrets reader, and who should give it a pass?

Themes to listen for

• The gap between the stories we tell and the lives we live
• Art and ambition versus the people they cost
• Memory and the unreliability of childhood
• Neglect, survival, and the bond between siblings
• How beloved stories change as we grow up

If your club liked this, try…

• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Where to get it

• Check availability at your local library
• Find it on Bookshop.org
• Listen on Libro.fm

Practical notes

Best for clubs that like gothic atmosphere and family secrets. The dual timeline rewards a discussion that tracks both threads at once.

Content notes: Child neglect, fire, and disturbing imagery.