Reading guide for The Blood Years by Elana K. Arnold

Reading Guide Questions

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. "[Y]ou could overwork the dough too—make it stiff, without tenderness" (pg. 92). Cam is talking about pizza dough, but he also says that it is a life lesson. Describe the life lesson in your own words. How does this lesson apply to Berlin? Cam? Jessie?
2. "For being Nehiyaw, for being a woman, once more because she was Black too. Three reasons for the RCMP to look the other way" (pg. 44). Explain what Cameron is saying here in your own words. How do anti-Native bigotry, misogyny, and anti-Blackness intersect with neglect on the part of the police?
3. Discuss the positive and negative ways that possibility is invoked by all the main characters. Berlin and her surrealists, Cam and his hope, and Jessie and her rebellion—how do you see possibility connecting with each of their desires for the future?
4. "When we can let the things that bring us together fall apart, become places without souls, it's another way we learn not to care about each other. Or about the land. Capitalism eats and eats and never satiates its hunger. It eats without thought. And that's not eating anymore. That's consumption" (pg. 102). A lot is packed into this statement from Berlin— explain it in your own words. What's your reaction to it? Describe a real-life example of the uncaring consumption that Berlin is defining here.
5. Discuss the manipulation and abuse of power by men (particularly white men) in the narrative. How do Jessie's father, Mr. MacDonald, and Dustin Granville wield power and cause harm to others in similar ways? Consider why the violence they commit receives news coverage while the everyday violence endured by vulnerable community members does not.
6. Kiki's perspective is the only one we get in the form of poetry, and it's also the only one we don't get firsthand. How do the interjections of Kiki's poems impact your reading? How does Kiki's narrative and its relation to the other characters and the novel as a whole connect to the ongoing human rights crisis of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People?
7. In her author's note, Jen Ferguson mentions the insidiousness of anti-Blackness and the ways that even otherwise critically conscious Berlin perpetuates anti-Blackness against Joe. What connections exist between anti-Indigenous bigotry and anti-Black racism? How does push-back against anti-Indigenous bigotry and colonizer perspectives still leave room for anti-Blackness?

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