Games Untold

Does the Hawthorne boys’ brotherhood help them overcome their fraught legacy? Consider their relationships with each other and with their grandfather. How do they relate to each other, and how is their dynamic affected by their relationships with Tobias?

Games, puzzles, and riddles feature throughout the collection. Analyze the narrative, symbolic, and thematic significance of these pastimes. Consider what the games offer the characters and how the games impact their relationships.

The collection’s primary characters are all wealthy. Explore the narrative and thematic significance of their privilege. Does money affect their relationships, pastimes, and self-discovery journeys? What comment is the author making with her development of the characters’ economic circumstances?

Compare Hannah and Tobias’s relationships with their families in “The Same Backward and Forward.” How do their parents, their legacies, and their family histories impact their emotional growth and transformation? How do they endeavor to either embody or live beyond the parameters of their family legacies?

“That Night in Prague,” “The Same Backward as Forward,” “The Cowboy and the Goth,” and “$3CR3T $@NT@” are narrated from the first-person points of view of female characters. Craft an argument that explores the narrative and thematic effects of this formal choice. Consider how these stories would change if narrated from the male protagonists’ perspectives.

The author toys with conventional plot structures throughout the collection. Choose three stories and explore how their structures and forms enact their thematic explorations. Consider how chapter divisions and temporal shifts relate to the characters’ experiences.

“That Night in Prague” and “Pain at the Right Gun” are interconnected stories. Explore the narrative, structural, and thematic effect of these stories’ relationship, considering questions like why they are placed at the beginning and end of the collection, why they are narrated from different points of view, and how they are related to the surrounding stories.

 Analyze the collection’s thematic explorations of family legacy and the Complexity of Family Dynamics. What scenes, images, symbols, and scenarios in the collection illustrate this theme? How does the author subvert notions of stereotypical family dynamics throughout the collection?