Fiona Range
by Mary McGarry Morris
List Price: $14.00
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0141001844
Publisher: Penguin
Abandoned by her young mother, unsure of her father's identity, and raised by her prominent aunt and uncle near Boston, thirty-year-old Fiona Range has developed a high threshold for emotional pain. Her recklessness, generosity, and poor judgment have landed her in more scrapes than her affluent family-or small-town community-can tolerate. Beautiful, volatile and smart-tongued (or trashy, erratic, and wild, depending on whom you ask), Fiona hits rock bottom after she ends a party with a strange man in her bed. Alienated from relatives and friends but determined to change, Fiona turns to the men in her life-among them, cruel and unstable Patrick Grady, who denies she is his daughter. The arrival home of her gentle cousin Elizabeth with fiance in tow sparks a storm where past mistakes and current passions collide.
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1. Fiona is blamed as a seductress, while the men she has relations with are regarded as her victims. Is this an accurate assessment? Why do you think Elizabeth doesn't blame George for sleeping with Fiona?
2. Rudy is aware of Fiona's promiscuous reputation but does not condemn her for it the way George does. How much of Fiona's "reputation" is based upon small-town morality? Do you think Fiona would have grown up differently in an urban environment?
3. Are any of the Hollises genuinely happy? Why or why not? Were the Hollis children's feelings for Fiona affected more by their parents' attitude toward her or by Fiona's own actions? Do they love her?
4. Was Elizabeth ever really in love with Rudy? Did she realize how drastically she was misleading him or were her perceptions too skewed by her fragile mental state? Was Rudy ever really in love with Elizabeth?
5. More than anyone else in the novel, Chester is the paternal figure in Fiona's life. How significant is it that he is the victim of Patrick's violence?
6. How culpable is Aunt Arlene? What was her moral responsibility to her niece as well as to her own children?
7. What is your opinion about what happens to the Hollis family, particularly Judge Hollis, at the end of the novel? Do you think Aunt Arlene did the right thing in staying with him?
8. If you were Fiona, would you have remained in Dearborn after discovering the truth about your parentage?
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"Morris is a master storyteller, an acute observer of small-town America and of people who struggle, sometimes in vain, to have lives that amount to more than hard work and a cold bed… Fiona Range, the novel, is a wealth of passion and heartbreak."
—USA Today
"Propels the reader along so swiftly, the novel can be devoured in one sitting… A fascinating portrait of a woman whose instinctive sense of a mystery about herself leads her to uncover that secret at all costs."
—Chicago Tribune
"She can bring the ordinary to life with the sheer clarity of vision. She knows how a house with children in it sounds at night, what the heat and bustle in a kitchen feel like before a family dinner and how indiscretions arise in a dining room when everyone is flushed with wine."
—New York Times Book Review
"As readable as its heroine is compulsive, this is the kind of book that makes you stay up half the night and (like its heroine) hate yourself in the morning."
—The New Yorker
