Strange Sally Diamond

1. General Impressions

Gather initial thoughts and broad opinions about the book.

• How did the interplay of genres (crime novel, mystery, family drama) affect your interaction with the text? Do you normally read any or all of these genres? Did that experience with other texts affect how you viewed Strange Sally Diamond?
• Does the novel suggest that it’s possible to escape the past?

2. Personal Reflection and Connection

Encourage readers to connect the book’s themes and characters with their personal experiences.

• Sally doesn’t see a point in funerals. What rituals around death do you find comforting, and which do you find unimportant or personally meaningless?
• Strange Sally Diamond looks at the “nature versus nurture” debate, given Sally and Peter’s upbringings. Which of these forces do you feel is more powerful in determining one’s character?
• Do you feel that Sally should have given Mark money from the house sale? Why or why not?
• Thomas doesn’t push Sally to expand her social circle to let her avoid more pain. Do you think pain should always, never, or sometimes be avoided? What are the limits and reasoning behind your answer?
• Have you ever had an aspect of your identity that others consider negative but that you consider positive? If so, what, and how does this positively affect your life?
• Have you ever broken an unspoken social rule? What happened?

3. Societal and Cultural Context

Examine the book’s relevance to societal issues, historical events, or cultural themes.

• Angela understands some of the social pressures Sally faces because Angela faces discrimination as a lesbian. Do you feel that the novel’s view of how different forms of social discrimination can create unity is realistic or optimistic?
• What does Thomas tell us about ethics in psychotherapy? Based on your understanding of therapist-patient relationships, do you think Thomas acted in the best interests of his patients?

4. Literary Analysis

Dive into the book’s structure, characters, themes, and symbolism.

• How do different characters attempt to reimagine their childhoods through interacting with other children or childhood objects? What does this accomplish for those characters?
• How does the novel frame Peter’s “disease” as similar to or different from Sally’s self-isolation?
• What everyday objects symbolize the past in the novel?
• What do the flashback chapters from Peter’s perspective tell you about how characters in the novel tell stories about or make sense of their own histories?

5. Creative Engagement

Encourage imaginative and creative connections to the book.

• The novel ends with Amanda receiving a teddy bear in the mail. What do you think would happen next in the narrative if the story continued?
• Compare Strange Sally Diamond to other books about children who grow up in isolation. (Consider, for example Emma Donohue’s Room or Delia Owens’s Where the Crawdads Sing.) Based on this comparison, how do different forms of “isolation” have different effects? How do you think Sally would react to the situations in one of those novels (or the characters in one of those novels to Sally’s situation)?
• Craft a newspaper article, script to a news clip, or another form of media that describes the novel at its beginning, and then a “follow up” piece for the end. How would these media items differ?

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