Winter Sisters Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Weathering Some of the Biggest Recorded Storms Ever and our BookBrowse Review of Winter Sisters.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Agency, the ability to act on one's own accord and determine one's own life, was not something most nineteenth-century women or girls possessed. Not medically, not legally, not professionally, not in their public lives, and many not in their private lives. What degree of agency are the various women characters in Winter Sisters able to seize for themselves? To what dangers - emotional, physical, social - are they then subjected as a result? How does this theme of agency play out in Elizabeth's subplot? In Viola's?
2. Mary drugs Emma and Claire in order to examine them. Is this another violation of Emma and Claire's agency or is it an act of compassion that protects them from further violation? Did Mary have a choice? What would have happened, do you think, if she hadn't drugged them?
3. Child trafficking around the globe remains a contemporary and enormous problem. That problem is portrayed in Winter Sisters in an historical context. Does the historical lens magnify, minimize, distort, or clarify this monumental global crisis?

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