Alphabet Weekends
Love on the Road from A to Z
by Elizabeth Noble

List Price: $14.95
Pages: 448
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0061122181
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks

Natalie and Tom have been best friends forever. But Tom wants more, and he’s going to prove to Natalie that they were meant to be together. He makes a wildly romantic proposition: spend 26 weekends together, indulging in a different activity from A-to-Z. In six months, he argues, they will be desperately in love. The cautious Natalie—still heartbroken over her ex-boyfriend Simon—isn’t so sure.

But Tom and Natalie aren’t the only ones coping with the vagaries of love. Natalie’s mother is going through her own crisis, and Lucy, Tom’s unhappily married sister-in-law, yearns to give in to temptation. All of them are about to learn that no matter how clever they are, love—and life—isn’t always as easy as A, B, C . . .

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1. How would you characterize Natalie and Tom’s childhood friendship, and to what extent does it seem like they would make good romantic partners as adults?

2. How do the friendships in Alphabet Weekends (between Lucy and Marianne; Natalie and Rose; and Tom and his work colleagues, Rob and Serena) reveal differing levels of trust, dependence, and affection?

3. How does Natalie’s relationship with her father, Nicholas, compare to her relationship with her mother, Anna, and what are the implications of her feelings as both of her parents confront significant health problems in Alphabet Weekends?

4. “I’m a romantic—what’s wrong with that?” In what ways does Tom challenge Natalie’s idealized vision of romance?

5. Why does Natalie agree to have dinner with her ex-boyfriend, Simon? How fair to Tom is Natalie’s decision to meet up with Simon again?

6. How do to the trips to the Health Farm and to Paris alter the course of Natalie and Tom’s relationship and the depth of their feelings for each other?

7. Why does Nicholas’s stroke enable Anna to overcome her clinical depression?

8. Why might Patrick’s impotence and feelings of inadequacy after losing his job contribute to Lucy’s decision to seek out an extramarital affair with Alec?

9. Of all of the romantic relationships explored in Alphabet Weekends, which seems the strongest and why?

10. How did the plot of Alphabet Weekends enable your appreciation of the unfolding relationship between Natalie and Tom?

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