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Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

The Tea Rose: A Novel

1. In a novel, can a city be more than a setting? Can it influence a character? Or be a character itself? In what way does London shape Fiona?

2. Early in The Tea Rose, Paddy tells Fiona that he doesn’t believe in God, he believes that three pounds of meat make a very good stew. Fiona, too, loses her faith in the aftermath of the losses she suffers. Is it more important to have faith in God, or in yourself? Are the two mutually exclusive?

3. Fiona is a person driven by the past. Is that a good or bad thing? Or both?

4. Is there such a thing as true love? A soul mate? What would have happened to Fiona and Joe if they had never been reunited? What sort of person would Fiona have become if she had married Will?

5. Kate’s friend Lily defends the way Jack’s prostitute victims make their living by saying that “Morality is for them who can afford it.” Do you agree? Is a person’s moral code something that’s written in stone, or does it vary with her circumstances? Would your code of conduct change if you were poor and hungry?

6. Nick encounters brutality from his father because of his homosexuality. He feels he cannot be open about his identity in New York and eventually gets into a great deal of trouble for visiting a gay bar. How have attitudes toward gay people changed over the last century? Do you think a marriage between a gay man and straight woman is realistic? Could it work?

7. When Fiona returns to Whitechapel, she realizes that even with all the success and wealth she’s achieved as an adult, she has never been happier than when she lived on Montague Street. Once you leave the place where you grew up, is it possible to go home again?

8. Both Fiona and Joe are fighters. What makes one person accept her circumstances and another fight to better them? Ambition? Damage? Loss? Fear? If Fiona and Joe had married as teenagers, would each have achieved all that they did?

9. Though The Tea Rose is set in the past, Fiona has a very modern sensibility and faces many problems that 21st century women face. Do you think that women today are different from their late 19th century counterparts? In what ways? In what ways are they the same?

 

The Tea Rose: A Novel
by Jennifer Donnelly

  • Publication Date: December 10, 2007
  • Paperback: 592 pages
  • Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
  • ISBN-10: 0312378025
  • ISBN-13: 9780312378028