Book Club Companions

Poetry Collection

Crossings

Twenty-seven poems and an epilogue of family, inheritance, 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 →

Novel · 2019 · Kirkus Starred Review

Give Them Unquiet Dreams

A novel about the haunted territory of family — what we inherit, what we conceal, and what eventually surfaces — set in 1970s Irish Catholic Boston.

1. The novel is set in 1970s Irish Catholic Boston. How does the historical and religious setting shape what characters are able to say to each other directly, versus what stays unspoken?
2. Kirkus described the novel as “a luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit.” Where do you see the fairy-tale register enter a story otherwise grounded in realistic family history?
3. The book concerns what a family inherits, conceals, and eventually cannot keep hidden. Choose one secret in the novel and trace how its concealment shapes the people around it, not just the person keeping it.
4. How does memory function as a structural device in the novel — is the past treated as settled, or as something still being negotiated by the present-day characters?
5. Discuss the novel’s pacing. Where does Mulhern let a scene breathe, and where does he compress years into a paragraph? What determines that choice?
6. What role does Catholic faith and ritual play for the characters — comfort, obligation, or something more ambiguous?
7. How does the novel handle grief across generations? Do older and younger characters grieve differently, and if so, how?
8. By the novel’s end, what has actually changed for the family, and what has simply been named or acknowledged for the first time?

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, Nonna, 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. Discuss the novel as a coming-of-age story set in Italian-American Boston. What does its specific cultural and geographic setting add that a more generic setting would lose?
6. Where does the novel use comedy alongside its more serious family material? What is the effect of that mixture?
7. How does Molly’s voice change, if at all, between the novel’s opening and closing chapters?
8. What does the novel ultimately suggest about the possibility of choosing a different life than the one you were raised inside?

Story Collection

Assumptions and Other Stories

Short fiction in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, and Edgar Allan Poe — interior, observed, and steeped in Catholic imagery repurposed for grace rather than doctrine.

1. The collection has been compared to Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce, and Edgar Allan Poe. Choose one story and discuss which of those traditions it most resembles, and why.
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. Many of these stories are told from a child’s or adolescent’s point of view looking back. What does that retrospective narration allow the stories to do that a present-tense child’s voice could not?
4. Discuss the role of Catholic imagery and vocabulary across the collection. Is it treated with reverence, irony, both, or something harder to name?
5. Where in the collection does an ordinary object or gesture — food, clothing, a household task — carry more emotional weight than the dialogue around it?
6. How does the collection use humor, and what kind of moments does that humor tend to interrupt or soften?
7. Choose two stories in the collection and compare how each handles a flawed or difficult family member with compassion rather than judgment.
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 spare, lyrical novella 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. As a shorter form than a novel, how does the novella compress its central relationships? What has to be implied rather than shown?
3. The book was praised for feeling like it “literally jumps off the page.” Where does the prose feel most immediate or urgent, and what techniques create that effect?
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. How does the novella’s spare, lyrical style shape your sense of the characters’ inner lives, compared to a more expansive or explanatory style?
6. Discuss the idea of home in the novella — is it a place, a person, a feeling, or some combination?