Book Club Companions

Poetry Collection · 2026

Reading Guides by Book

Crossings

Twenty poems of family, water, and threshold. This companion has its own full page, with questions grouped by Voice, Themes, and Line Breaks, plus a critical essay on sensory imagery.

Open the full Crossings Companion · View on Amazon

Novel · 2019 · Kirkus Starred Review

Give Them Unquiet Dreams

Boston, 1976: a boy with second sight wants his mother out of the psychiatric hospital where doctors have called her schizophrenic.

1. Nana tells Aiden on the first page, “Weak people get nowhere in this world,” and teaches him “Keep calm and carry on.” How does her creed help him, and what does it cost him?
2. Kirkus described the novel as “a luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.” Where do you see fairy tale enter a story otherwise grounded in realistic family history?
3. Doctors call Laura schizophrenic for seeing what Aiden also sees. The novel never settles whether she is ill or gifted. Where did you find yourself believing her, and where did you doubt?
4. Sinead’s death at a well in Ireland is told more than once. What changes with each telling, and why might the family need to keep telling it?
5. The book moves between rural Ireland and 1970s Boston. What does the Irish past explain about Catherine that the Boston chapters alone could not?
6. Martin drowns saving his brother. How does his death change Aiden, and how does the family remember him?
7. Catherine carries guilt from Ireland to Boston, and Aiden inherits both her stories and her gift. What else is handed down in this family, and what is refused?
8. Near the end, the ghost the family has feared turns out to be someone unexpected. Did the revelation surprise you? Looking back, where had the book prepared you for it?

Novel · 2016

Molly Bonamici

A literary coming-of-age novel set in Italian-American Boston, whose narrator argues with The Great Gatsby even as she borrows its central image for her own longing.

1. Molly rejects The Great Gatsby on first reading—“Daisy was a pain in the ass, and Gatsby was anything but great”—and then adopts Fitzgerald’s green light as her own image of longing. What does it mean that she argues with a book even as she borrows from it?
2. The novel opens with epigraphs from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Dante’s Paradiso. How do those two very different texts frame what follows?
3. How does Molly’s relationship with her grandmother, Agnella, differ from her relationship with her mother? What does each relationship supply that the other cannot?
4. Molly fears “the cult of domesticity” and ending up “like my mother in a horrible relationship.” How does the novel treat her resistance to that inherited path—as rebellion, self-preservation, or something else?
5. A faith healer declares the teenage Molly an “Angel of Death,” and Molly reports it without alarm. Why might the novel give her such a calm voice for such a strange prophecy?
6. Molly is funny about things that would frighten most people, including violence at home. When does her comedy protect her, and when does it keep her from feeling?
7. Several women named Mary pass through the novel. Choose one and discuss what she gives Molly.
8. The novel ends with Molly walking out of the sea “grateful to be home at last.” What does “home” mean by then, and how did she get there?

Story Collection

Assumptions and Other Stories

Stories of family, Catholic ritual, and grace that turns up in unlikely people.

1. Do any of these stories remind you of other writers you have read? Choose one story and discuss what, if anything, it brings to mind, and where it seems most its own.
2. Reviewers have praised the collection’s mixture of “grace and despair.” Choose a story where both are present in the same scene, and discuss how Mulhern balances them.
3. “Assumptions” opens with the grandfather calling Peggy Fleming the “homeliest damn woman” he had ever seen. How does the story make you revise that first judgment, and when did your view of her change?
4. The title story takes place on the Feast of the Assumption and begins with a line from the Song of Solomon: “You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.” Why that verse for a story about Peggy?
5. Peggy’s housedress, with its tiny roses and juice stains at the sleeves, is described with great care. Find another ordinary object in the collection that carries more feeling than anything said aloud.
6. How does the collection use humor, and what kind of moments does that humor tend to interrupt or soften?
7. The collection is about what people assume of one another. Choose a story in which a character is wrong about someone, and talk about what the mistake reveals.
8. What do these stories, taken together, suggest about grace—where it comes from, and who is allowed to receive it?

Novella · 2016

A Prayer for Home

A novella of Molly’s grandmother’s Boston household, praised by the Missouri Review for its complex characters and “fantastic voice,” and a Wishing Shelf Red Ribbon Winner in the UK.

1. The Missouri Review praised the novella’s “well-written, complex characters” and “fantastic voice.” What do you notice about the voice specifically—diction, rhythm, restraint—that creates that effect?
2. The novella takes its epigraph from a music-hall drinking song, “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” How does that song sit beside the devotional sound of the title?
3. Mrs. Muldoon first appears “drunk as a skunk,” looking for her dead husband, and Nonna explains her as having “squash rot.” How do the adults’ jokes about her change as her story darkens?
4. What does the title, A Prayer for Home, suggest about the novella’s central longing? Is that longing satisfied, denied, or left open by the ending?
5. Agnella tells strangers that Molly has leukemia to get ahead in line, and Molly plays along. What does the family’s talent for performance teach Molly about belief?
6. Mrs. Muldoon plans a trip “home” to Ireland. What does home mean to her, to Agnella, and to Molly by the last page?