Introduction

Maggie Duprès, recently "involuntarily separated from payroll" at a Silicon Valley startup, is whiling away her days in The Dragonfly's Used Books, a Mountain View institution, waiting for the Next Big Thing to come along.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
To Make You Essential to Me

Love finds for us what we do not know we want. —Henry

Books don’t change people’s lives, not like everyone thinks they do. Reading The Razor’s Edge while flying in first class to a meditation resort or The Sheltering Sky on a postdivorce hike to see what’s left of the snows of Kilimanjaro won’t make you any more enlightened than spinning in the teacups at Disneyland. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth of it. And the used books here at the Dragonfly aren’t infused with any more wisdom than the virginal new ones at Apollo Books & Music. Our books are just cheaper and more tattered. But people keep coming. They keep asking me for elixirs of paper and words to soothe their disappointments and revive their smothered passions. They come because they believe a book transformed my life. Not one of them understands. It wasn’t the book that did it. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

"Books don't change lives, not like people think they do." Do you agree or disagree with the first line in Shelly King's novel? Do you think it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek? Did a book, or books, change Maggie's life?

At the beginning of the novel, Maggie's life is in a holding pattern after her layoff. Have you ever been laid off or fired? Does Maggie's experience, of feeling part of a corporate family and then being let go, resonate with you?

Though the Silicon Valley Women Executives Association Book Club is an extreme (and somewhat satirical) example of a reading group, have you encountered similar dynamics in any of your own reading groups? What do you think makes for a good reading group? Have you ever written in a book?

How does Maggie's relationship with her mother change over the course of the novel?

Do you fault Georgine for staying in her marriage? Why or why not?

Throughout the book, we meet characters who want to lose themselves in other worlds--from those who read romances to those who imagine they're Henry or Catherine and still others who participate in medieval re-creations. What does it say about these characters, and the world they all do live in, that they create and escape to these other worlds? Have you ever pretended to be someone else, either in real life or a virtual world?

What do you think happens to Maggie and Rajhit after the novel ends?

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