Hachette Livre

Hachette Reading Group Guides

Welcome to our Reading Group guide for Remembering The Bones by Frances Itani. We invite you to consider and discuss the following questions when reading this book:

  1. How is this novel a survival story, with suspense and terror? The inciting force is obviously the car crash. What qualities in Georgie engage us and elevate the book beyond an adventure tale?
  2. How is Remembering the Bones an exploration of consciousness? A philosophical study of the self that is Georgie? Do you feel that the plunge into the ravine is in fact a gift that propels her to examine her life and family?
  3. What mythic analogues can you think of that give us insight into Georgie’s predicament? Name and discuss several. Prometheus? Sisyphus? Why or why not? Others?
  4. How does Georgie’s dilemma symbolize the essential universal human condition? Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Kafka’s Metamorphosis are both invoked directly or indirectly in the book. Why? What are similarities with these characters that Georgie shares? Helplessness? Perplexity? Skepticism? (“And so I am stuck, a beetle on my back, talking to myself” (p. 29). Does Georgie seem to have some resources that are denied to Beckett’s Didi and Gogo and Kafka’s Gregor?
  5. What clues do the chapter names (bones) give to Georgie’s life? To the meaning of the book? How do they provide the skeletal structure of the novel? How has Gray’s Anatomy sustained her?
  6. “Haven’t the Danforth women always been independent?” (p. 2) Trace the self-reliance of the four generations of women in the family. Talk about the challenges and triumphs of Grand Dan, Phil, Georgie, and Case. How do humor, stubbornness, craft, and plain strength run through the family? With broken bones, the cold, thirst, and increasing darkness, Georgie says, “I’ll do what has to be done” (p. 20) and “Then start moving, Georgie. Get yourself started” (p. 21). The language is as simple as the threat is dire.
  7. “My grandmother, Grand Dan, said I had the memory of an unwiped slate. But memory can also be a curse” (p. 24). How do you think memory functions in the novel? Is it a gift or a curse? Georgie is comforted that her memory has not failed her though her body has. “Memory is holding. Miss Grinfeld would be proud” (p. 63).
  8. Does Georgie become someone different in the ravine? Or is she a distillation of who she has always been? “My mind is moving in circles. Mistress of sequential disarray, that’s what Harry called me” (p. 62). Do you agree?
  9. How is the theme of mothers and daughters central to the book? Georgie still occupies a position in between: she is both a mother and a daughter. About Phil, she says, “Oh, Mother. I loved her at that moment, but what a motherlode is she. She’s a true mistress of evasion, but she never gives up. She’s the only resident of the Haven who is over a hundred, and describes herself as ‘Edwardian—just’”(p. 27). Talk about some of the stories of mothers and daughters in the book.
  10. Describe Case and her life decisions. How is she a woman who likes to be in charge? How has she definitively changed the patterns of the family? “She solves problems, chooses plays, directs. She doesn’t want to humor a mother who can look inside her past – the last thing that interests her right now” (p. 73).
  11. How does the heirloom glass tree become a unifying image in the book? Passed down from Georgie’s grandfather, it was called “the tree of life” (p. 146). As Georgie falls through the ravine, through actual trees, she fastens on the image of the glass tree. How and why? What was the fate of the glass tree? (pp. 169-70) What is her reaction to the fancy that she “might become the tree” in the ravine? (p. 7)
  12. What are some of the violent events that occur in the story? Think about lighting a fire under a recalcitrant horse. About Uncle Fred and rough justice at the outdoor pump. About the grandfather blown up by a bomb in the war. And finally about the shocking central car accident.
  13. Lazarus is a figure that has piqued Georgie’s imagination since childhood. How does the idea of miraculous rebirth lend mythic significance to this story? Does she in a way already have a rebirth after the crash as she tests her physical and mental resources? Georgie offers praise for small things in the ravine that seem like miracles. What are they?
  14. What is the function of Lilibet, Queen of England, in the novel? How is she valuable to Georgie? Sounding board? Parallel life—both like and unlike Georgie’s? “I just realized that on Wednesday, the 19th of April, the day of the birthday lunch—whether it’s come or gone—the Queen will be the only person in the whole world who will know that I’m missing” (p. 188). What is the crashing irony of Georgie’s fate, thanks to the Queen?
  15. “Have I dreamed my life, invented it as I lie here?” (p. 163) Talk about how storytelling is regenerative for any family. In contrast to Georgie’s ready recalling is her husband who lost home and family early on. “Harry said little about his history until just before we married. He was not a person who talked a great deal, and I believe he was terrified to unearth his own life. But once started, one memory yanked on another until his past spilled out like sheets tied together in an attic and tossed out a window for rescue” (p. 136). How is this a vivid but oddly inverted image for what Georgie is doing?
  16. Talk about the birds in the book and what they mean to Georgie. Why have human beings always attributed special powers to birds? Have you had experiences when birds seemed to signify something beyond themselves? Think about Itani’s use of the crows and geese, especially snow geese. After Matt dies, Georgie is struck by the “wondrous, all-encompassing sound of many wings beating. The sound of angels” (p. 262) What other times does she sense or long for a connection with spirits?
  17. Who is Georgie in her own eyes? What animates her? Does she succeed in being as honest about herself as she tries to be? Examples? What are moments when she reveals her own weakness or pettiness? What will be her legacy? Do you think she will remain as actual a presence as her Grand Dan? Does she feel diminished by the encroaching end of her line? Thinking of her centenarian mother, does she feel real regret that she may not achieve those next twenty years?
  18. What does music mean to Georgie? Her hymns and chants and songs? Django Reinhardt? The music of her son-in-law?
  19. What do you think happens at the end? Is Georgie to be spared her mother’s half-life at the Haven? Is Case’s production of Waiting for Godot increasingly relevant to Georgie’s fate? How
    20. ?
  20. Is there hope in the novel? If so, cite some examples.
  21. Consider the epigraph for the novel, quoted before the beginning: “And do you wonder/about your place under the huge/ invisibly starry sky . . . /as I do mine?” As Georgie says, “I’ve lived my life and that’s that. And what was the point of it? What have I done? Has anyone paid attention? I’m from a time that is dismissed, deemed unimportant. Women my age are invisible. When we reach our sixties, we’re discounted, sidelined. Even before that. But it’s our world, too. We live in it and we are many. I’ve lived in it every day for eighty years” (p. 165). She raises issues of our time and perhaps all times. How did Dan’s and Phil’s lives insist on meaning by their staying in their children’s lives? Georgie voices these bleak thoughts, but do you agree she refuses to succumb to them? How do her dialogues with herself and actions, however circumscribed, rage against the dying of the light?

Current Reading Group Titles

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  2. The Disappeared by Kim Echlin
  3. The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin
  4. Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker
  5. The Other Hand by Chris Cleave
  6. Testimony by Anita Shreve
  7. Home by Marilynne Robinson
  8. The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
  9. City of Thieves by David Benioff
  10. Remembering The Bones by Frances Itani
  11. The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton
  12. Lies by Enrique de Heriz
  13. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner
  14. Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt
  15. Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
  16. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
  17. The Sisterhood by Emily Barr
  18. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  19. The Rose Labyrinth by Titania Hardie
  20. The Return by Victoria Hislop
  21. A Small Part of History by Peggy Elliott
  22. A Carrion Death by Michael Stanley
  23. Scapegallows by Carol Birch
  24. Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
  25. Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat
  26. Radiance by Shaena Lambert
  27. Rose of Sebastopol by Katharine McMahon
  28. The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell
  29. Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott
  30. The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle
  31. Golden Age by Tahmima Anam
  32. Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
  33. The Keep by Jennifer Egan
  34. The Saffron Kitchen by Yasmin Crowther
  35. Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson
  36. The Blood of Flowers by Anita Amirrezvani
  37. April in Paris by Michael Wallner
  38. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
  39. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
  40. Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet
  41. Red River by Lalita Tademy
  42. The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
  43. Rosetta by Barbara Ewing
  44. The Mathematics of Love by Emma Darwin
  45. The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
  46. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell

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