Miss Morgan's Book Brigade

The novel is mainly narrated from Kit’s perspective, yet it is titled Miss Morgan’s Book Brigade. Why do you think Skeslien Charles chose this title, and what does it communicate?

Evaluate the novel’s representation of class structures at the end of World War I. What is the role of established structures and ideas, and in what ways do the war and the actions of women like Kit begin to alter them?

Analyze the use of Wendy’s and Kit’s interwoven storylines to structure the novel. How does each build meaning, tension, or characterization?

Examine the representation of men throughout the novel. Choose a specific male character and analyze his words and actions through a cultural, feminist, or patriarchal lens.

Analyze the allusions to famous literary works in the novel. How do the novels and quotations Kit and Wendy reference reveal their character? How do they represent each woman’s efforts to make sense of the world?

Compare and contrast this novel with Skeslien Charles’s other librarian novel, The Paris Library. What similarities and differences of setting, theme, and plot are apparent? What conclusions can you draw?

Skeslien Charles writes in her Author’s Note that texts explaining how the Cards approached the 1918 pandemic took on a greater significance when she reviewed them in 2020. Examine the responses to the pandemic by Cards and villagers in the novel and compare them to responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Kit’s mother quotes My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin in an effort to comfort her after Tom’s death: “Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings” (211). Explore the ways one or more characters process traumatic events in the novel. In what way does having “someone to tell it to” lessen their power?