Adrift in the Sound (34 page)

DISCUSSION GROUP QUESTIONS

1. How are national events used to frame the novel?
   
2. What role do spiritual values play in the characters’ lives?
   
3. How does the environment shape the story?
   
4. Compared to 1973, where are we now as a people and a nation? What has changed and what has remained the same?
   
5. What do the Native American characters and the other characters in the story have in common and what makes them different?
   
6. What role do the various civil rights struggles—women, Native Americans, Chicano, gay—play in the novel?
   
7. Discuss Lizette’s relationship with Marian.
   
8. Discuss Lizette’s relationship with Rocket and with her father.
   
9. What is important to Lizette’s journey toward a greater sense of well-being?
   
10. What does baby Violet represent in the novel, actually and symbolically?
    

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A native Californian, Kate Campbell grew up in San Francisco and on family ranches in Marin and Lake counties. She holds a journalism degree from San Francisco State University and has worked as a reporter and freelance writer for newspapers and magazines throughout the West and beyond. She writes frequently about natural resources and the environment and publishes The Word Garden, a weekly blog that focuses on the arts, gardens and the environment at
www.kate-campbell.blogspot.com
. The mother of two grown sons, she lives at the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers.

About the Mercer Street Books Fiction Prize

Adrift in the Sound
is a 2011 finalist for the Mercer Street Books Fiction Prize. This literary award recognizes emerging writers who have a completed a novel, but have not yet published it. The prize is sponsored by Mercer Street Books & Records in New York City’s Greenwich Village.