Windfalls A Novel [Paperback]

The acclaimed author ofInto the Forestmines our fears and explores our capacity to love in this epic tale of modern motherhood.
Young and pregnant, Cerise and Anna make very different decisions about how to direct their lives. While teenaged Cerise struggles to support herself and her young daughter, Anna finishes college, marries, and later gives birth to two daughters of her own. After the birth of her second child, a tragic accident tears Cerise's life apart, and she loses her already tenuous position in society. As the story progresses--and Cerise's and Anna's lives interweave and inexorably approach each other--both women are dramatically, forever changed. Unforgettable, awe-inspiring, and grippingly honest, Windfalls is a daring and mesmerizing tale.Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. Why do you think Jean Hegland chose to call her novelWindfalls? Do you think it is a good title for the book? Why or why not?
2. The novel opens with a lyrical description of one of Anna's photographs -- of a lone tree on a barren windswept hillside beneath a stormy sky, its trunk split almost in two. What purpose do the tree and its photograph serve in the novel and in the lives of the two main characters?
3. Both Anna and Cerise find themselves facing unplanned pregnancies, but they make very different decisions about their lives. Were the choices they made the right ones for them at the time? Do they turn out to be wise decisions as their lives unfold?
4.Windfallshas been described as a deeply stirring novel about the choices that every woman faces. Discuss the ways that life circumstances either force choices on us or take them away from us.
5. Joelle Fraser, author ofThe Territory of Men,describesWindfallsas an elegy to motherhood in all its painful, beautiful complexity. Talk about the rapturous joys and heartbreaking sorrows and terrors of motherhood depicted inWindfalls.What other novels have you readls