A huge shout-out belongs to my critique partner, Lizbeth Selvig, for her last-minute help with revisions. Your advice is always spot-on, and your friendship means the world to me.
Thank you, as well, to my friends in Rome, Alessandra and Riccardo, for fueling my imagination with bottles of wine and tales of missing gold. A humongous thank-you to Deeva Rose, my burlesque instructor. Having the chance to perform burlesque in front of a packed house gave me wonderful insight into Vi’s love of the art. It was also a lot of fun!
Finally, I want to thank my children for loving their distracted, disorganized mother. I know my texts didn’t always make sense, but you replied anyway. I love you both to the moon and back! And to my beloved husband—what can I say? There are simply no words to describe my love and appreciation of you. Completing this book has been an adventure, but you stayed right by my side, every step of the way. I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: you are simply the best.
General Book Club Discussion Questions
1. What was Vi’s greatest strength? Her biggest weakness?
2. Which character (or characters) did the most to help Vi become the person she is at the end?
3. Vi gives many reasons for why she ran away from home all those years ago. What do you think was the main one? How does she come to terms with it?
4. The topic of unplanned pregnancies comes up several times in the story, with each of the women taking different paths. How have times changed for women since the 1940s? How have they not?
5. Which characters were the most challenging to like? Did your view of them change by the end of the book?
6. Which character in the book would you most like to meet?
7. What do you think of the book’s title? How does it relate to the book’s contents? What other title might you choose?
8. What do you think the author’s purpose was in writing this book? What ideas was she trying to get across?
9. If you could hear this same story from another character’s point of view, who would you choose?
10. Of all the different subjects covered in the book (e.g., WWII, Italy, the USO, burlesque), which ones were familiar to you? What new things did you learn?
11. What aspects of the story could you most relate to?
About the Author
Photo © 2014 Shelley Anderson Photography
Ellen Lindseth is a graduate of University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Carlson School of Management. She has also studied at the Loft Literary Center (Minneapolis, MN) and is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association and the Romance Writers of America (RWA). She is the author of the novel A Girl Divided, a 2019 finalist for the RWA’s prestigious RITA Award, and “As Time Goes By,” a short story chosen for publication in the Midwest Fiction Writers’ anthology Festivals of Love.
When not writing about resourceful women of the 1940s, she feeds her passion for adventure by flying as a private pilot, researching new experiences (such as performing burlesque onstage for a local fundraiser), and traveling the world with her husband (also a pilot) in search of plot ideas. Currently she calls Minnesota home, where she resides with her husband, two rescued cats, an elderly bearded dragon, and a handful of fish. For more information, visit www.ellenlindseth.com.
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