Vandal Love Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Le Grand Hémorragie and our BookBrowse Review of Vandal Love.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. How does Vandal Love explore movement and what it does to people? What values are lost - or cemented - in migration? How do the novel's characters variously distance themselves from the past or try to recreate it?
   


2. Why does Isa-Marie take to her bed after Jude attacks her young friend? Do you think Jude felt guilt over her death? In what ways do love and destruction co-exist in this section? What other patterns of love twinned with destruction can you trace within the novel?
   


3. Characters within Vandal Love are frequently renamed or rename themselves. How important is reinvention and renaming in Vandal Love? What is involved in an act of naming? What historical, cultural, racial, and ethnic baggage is being abandoned, hidden, borrowed, invented, or hoped for when choosing a name? When various characters within Vandal Love change their name, how does their choice reflect or interact with the historical and cultural moment in which they find themselves - or wish to lose themselves?
   

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Milkweed Editions. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.