Book of Joan (Yuknavitch) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers questions for The Book of Joan … then take off on your own:

1. How does Lidia Yuknavitch portray life in her dystopian world? What activities brought the earth to its current crisis? What do you find most frightening in the author's futurist vision?

2.Talk about CIEL, which is filled what is left of humankind. What is the physical state of humans?

3. Discuss Jean de Men: his rise to power and his abuse of it. What are his ultimate goals, what does he hope to achieve? In what way, as the book progresses, does Jean de Men reveal himself even more heinous than he initially seems.

4. Why is Trinculo Forsythe scheduled to be executed? As the founder of CIEL, what has he been charged with?

5. Trinculo's partner, and the book's narrator, is Christine Pizan. Why does she insist on keeping the story of Joan alive? What does she hope to accomplish?

6. Christine burns the story into her skin: "Once she had a voice. Now her voice is in my body." Notice the interesting conjunction in Christine's use of the word "body" and the author's quotation (in the Reading Guide's Author Biography above): "I think things that happen to us are true. Writing is a whole other body." What might she mean by that insight...and what is the symbolic significance of Christine locating the book of Joan onto her body?

7. As Joan's story unfolds, we learn of her "otherworldly combat techniques." Talk about those. How does Joan use science's perspective in service to her aims?

8. Describe the animal world that Joan lives along side of. How do the animals impact Joan's rebellion and even her sense of her own self. Oilbirds, for instant, use echolocation to navigate, which Joan considers an "act of perfect imagination" and which reminds her "of her own warrior child self." What does she mean?

9. Does Lidia Yuknavitch offer any corrective to this dire world? Is their any hope on the horizon, so to speak? What lesson might the author want readers to learn?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online of off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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