44 pages • 1 hour read
Lucy GilmoreThe Lonely Hearts Book Club
Lucy GilmoreFiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Racing in the Rain Book Club
The Racing in the Rain Book Club is symbolic of community. Before Sloane Parker, Maisey Phillips, and Arthur McLachlan form the group, the characters’ lives are defined by loneliness and isolation. Maisey proposes reading The Remains of the Day with her two new friends after she and Sloane start caring for Arthur. Sloane is immediately inspired by the idea as she’s been trying to “get a club up and running” at the library for years (94). She and Arthur also have an innate appreciation for literature and find it easier to communicate about books than about more vulnerable topics. Maisey doesn’t define herself as a reader, but establishing the group with Sloane and Arthur welcomes her into a new collective. She soon discovers that she not only enjoys reading the books her group has selected, but that discussing these titles with the group helps her to articulate her own complex emotional world.
Over time, the book club expands to include a wider range of unlikely friends. The incorporation of Mateo, Greg, and Nigel into the club offers nuance to the group’s atmosphere and culture. Together, the friends not only relate over books, but discover The Importance of Community Support. They accept one another for their faults and shortcomings, encourage each other to grow and to change, and support one another through hardship and loss. The book club therefore encompasses all of the characters’ emotional and psychological needs and satisfies each of their desires for belonging and acceptance.
The characters’ commitment to sustaining the group amidst significant life changes conveys the club’s social significance. All of the friends are “terrified of what [will] happen if the book club” dissolves (133). They can each go on reading on their own time. However, they can’t recreate the same support system they’ve developed through the club. The image of the club members gathered around Arthur’s hospital bed in the novel’s closing scene conveys the fortifying effects of the group and reinforces the individual’s vital need for community and companionship.
Anne of Green Gables
The Anne of Green Gables book that the Racing in the Rain Book Club gives to Sloane is symbolic of friendship. When Arthur discovers that Sloane is planning to move to the East Coast with her fiancé Brett, he and his book club friends devise a plan to get her to stay. The project grants the characters a way to open their “heart[s] to her so that she [has] a real choice” about her decision to stay in or leave Coeur d’Alene (313). The characters understand The Healing and Transformative Power of Literature and therefore hope that giving Sloane their highlighted copy of her favorite book will remind her of the friendships she’s built in recent months.
Anne of Green Gables also has historical significance for both Sloane’s and Arthur’s characters. The novel was a formative facet of Sloane’s childhood and a primary way for her to connect with her dying sister. Furthermore, the novel “has something for everyone,” and centralizes themes of friendship and community (282). Arthur similarly relates to the story because he once used the book to communicate his own inarticulable feelings to his estranged wife. The novel’s compassionate handling of sensitive subject matter resonates with the Racing in the Rain Book Club, particularly because they’re all familiar with loneliness, abandonment, and loss. Anne of Green Gables is therefore representative of the connections they’ve fostered with each other and a reminder of the ways in which unlikely friendships can change the human heart.
Sloane’s Brooch
Sloane’s brooch is symbolic of loss. Sloane and her late sister, Emily Parker, made the brooch when they were children. It’s meant to resemble the “gleaming bronze setting and rich amethyst-colored stone” of Marilla Cuthbert’s brooch from Anne of Green Gables (29). However, Sloane’s childhood brooch is made of “layers of metallic Sharpie over plastic,” and the stone is “a paste gem” (29). Sloane rediscovers the brooch in Part 1 when she goes to her parents’ house searching for her old belongings. Although the pin replica is “starting to cloud with age,” Sloane pins it to her shirt and wears it throughout the remainder of the novel (29). The brooch reminds her of her sister and therefore helps Sloane to retain her connection with her late best friend. The brooch’s presence throughout the narrative in turn reifies Sloane’s ongoing sorrow over her sister.
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