Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to at help get a discussion started for All That I Have:
1. What are the domestic tensions between Wing and his wife, Clemmie? Would you imagine they're typical of a law officer's marriage? How do the two negotiate their way through their marital problems? Did you enjoy their bantering... find it humorous, tiresome, realistic... wish-I-could-say-that?
2. At one point Wing says, "In sheriffing you don't stop things from happening. You know you can't do that mostly, so you don't try. People are going to do what they're going to do. You let things happen." How effective is that as a philosophy of law & order? Doesn't it risk a certain fatalism or passivity?
3. Talk about Wingate, Wing's mentor, who appeared in the Castle's previous novel, Go With Me, and although older, also figures in this work as well. What are some of the things Wing learns or learned from him?
4. If you've read, Go With Me, by the way, how do you compare the two books?
5. What about Sean Duke? How fitting a nickname is Superboy and how did he earn it. Uh, how super is he?
6. Castle Freeman has an eye and ear for swagger and hypocrisy—not suffering fools gladly. Who are his targets as hypocrits in All That I Have?
7. Freeman is playing here with a favorite fictional trope: the slow-to-move, slow-to-burn, dead-pan law-officer, who seems "out-gunned" by his opponents—but who ends up getting the best of smarter, well-organized, vicious criminals. First—trace Wing's steps as he gradually unwinds the clues, then winds his way to victory. Second—can you think of other books, movies, and TV serials that have played on this irony?
8. This book has often been compared to Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. If you've read that work, what comparisons/contrasts do you see?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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