7. When Estella is about to face Connie after many years apart, she says: “I am clutching the banister, stuck between the upstairs and downstairs, between childhood and real life” (p. 129). What has kept Estella from her sister? And what has kept Connie from Estella? When Estella decides she wants to repair her relationship with Connie, she says: “Scars can be prevented when sewn up with care, but I’ve not been taught that particular skill. My stitches will be ragged, clumsily done. How many will it take?” (p. 193). If Estella had not saved Carson’s life, do you think she would have been able to repair her relationship with Connie? Do you foresee irreparable differences between Gib and Carson? Do you think the divorce will change that? Do you think Big Dune will change that?
8. Why do you think Connie repressed the memory of how she was saved from drowning? How did learning the truth change her relationship with Tate? With Estella? How would things have been different had she never learned the truth? Do you think Estella should have told Connie when she did?
9. Discuss the motif of drowning in the novel. Connie almost drowns as a teenager; her mother survived a storm as child but lost her two sisters; and Estella saves Carson from drowning during the storm. How does this recurring theme work throughout the story? Did you expect Carson’s near-drowning to happen? Did you expect Estella to save him? When Connie decides to move ahead with pursuing the divorce, she says: “I felt like an island, with my family eddying and flowing around me, unaware that I had become immoveable” (p. 60). How do islands, both actual and imagined, show up in this story?
10. Why do you think Connie ignored Luke’s infidelity for so many years? What made Deanna—the Escalade and the person—the last straw? Connie said: “I was the wife. . . . The only reason I put up with this over the years was because my position afforded me certain protections and guarantees” (p. 250). Do you think that Connie truly had “protections” and “guarantees” in her marriage to Luke? Do you think having such things is worth putting up with infidelity? How do you think Connie and Estella’s parents’ marriage influenced their daughters? Why does Estella wait so long to marry Paul, the love of her life?
11. Connie removes her wedding rings when she plays violin. About this, she says: “I’d never gotten the knack of playing with the rings on. It was too distracting for me, too invasive, and I rather liked the ritual of it, the trade of one life for another” (p. 45). What were Connie’s two lives? In which life was she the happiest? Did other characters have multiple lives in a similar way? When Connie removes her wedding rings for the final time, before the performance with her trio, how has she changed? Do you think she would consider herself to be living only one life at the end of the story?
12. “We are family,” Estella says about Connie after she learns that Connie is leaving Luke (p. 226). Why does Estella seem surprised when she says it? If she truly believes it, why, when she thinks she’s facing another relapse, does she tell Connie that she’s leaving Big Dune and needs “to get back to [her] support system, [her] family” (p. 362)? Discuss what makes someone “family” to you. Is blood enough? Can a person who doesn’t share your blood ever become your family? What do you believe author Kristy Kiernan is saying about family in this novel?
13. Do you agree with Connie’s reaction when she discovers how her mother came to marry her father? Connie tells her mother: “It’s like you were a horse to be traded or something! A poker chip to be won” (p. 79). Instead, Connie’s mother argues, her father was trying to give her “the gift of a life” (p. 79). How does Connie’s mother give her own children the “gift of a life”? How, in turn, does Connie do the same for her children? What sacrifices need to be made to ensure a child’s future?
14. Estella got pregnant when she was seventeen, but she didn’t tell Connie until many years later. Do you understand why she kept this a secret for so long? At the time, when she watched Connie about to drown in the Gulf, Estella thinks: “When she goes under the next time, I will go under too. . . . It is me who needs saving this time” (p. 13). Does Estella ever get saved? Does Paul save Estella? Does her math? Do her students? At the end of the novel, Estella says: “My math is back, but I’ve let it come, because the seeds have done their job, and I am clear for now, and for now is good enough” (p. 370). Why do you think she lost her math, and why do you think it returned?
15. Did you find the alternating first-person voices of Connie and Estella to be a successful way of telling this story? Why do you think the author chose to show both perspectives? How would the story have been different had we seen it only through Connie’s eyes? Or only through Estella’s?
16. Consider the epigraph at the start of the book: “If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses.” Does every child have the potential to be a genius? What can make genius possible, or impossible? How should a child prodigy be handled? How should any child’s natural talents be handled?
Catching Genius Page 33