DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
for Mary A. Agria’s Time in a Garden
1. How are the characters in this
story “broken people”? And how does the “time in the garden” become
both an opportunity for personal healing and growth? and a way of
creating community?
2. How do Adam and Eve’s pasts contribute to their fear of
relationships and complicate their ability to trust? What turning
points in the novel begin to change their isolation and respective
feelings of personal failure?
3. What role did Eve’s failure to divorce her first husband play in
her estrangement from her daughters, Leslie and Gina? How do events
in the novel contribute to changing those relationships?
4. How do “generations” play a role in the novel? Including
granddaughter Emma? And Jakob and Sarah Groft?
5. Which of the characters in the novel are the most compelling and
why?
6. How do the senior citizens in the story model both brokeness and
the potential for love and healthy relationships—specifically Eve’s
relationship to her boss George? To her friends Bea and Vi? The
ninety-year-olds Margot and Howard? Artie the Teamster and Vi? The
old gardener, Dutch?
7. How do the “garden quotes” and snippets from Eve’s columns and
journals contribute to the story? To the readers’ awareness of
growth and change taking place in the garden and in the lives of the
gardeners? To Eve’s identity as a writer?
8. What events in the story most clearly or compelling or humorously
reveal the quality and character of northern Michigan life and rural
lifestyles in general?
9. How does the novel’s ending both disturb reader expectations? And
affirm the beauty of life in people’s senior years? Why does the
author end the novel the way she does?
10. How can gardening serve as a powerful and meaningful metaphor
for our life journey, whether we are gardeners or not?
Download a PDF version of these
questions for printing.
TO MEET THE AUTHOR: arrange for a phone "Author Chat" for a book
group; schedule a signing or reading; follow Ms. Agria’s monthly
online "Reflections"; or learn more about her other novels/books, by
contacting her website at www.maryagria.com
